The Secret History of Lead

Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of

The Nation Institute. Follow-ups: "Amplification," June 19,

2000 and letters exchanges: "Lead--Balloons and Bouquets,"

May 15, and "Lead-Letter Office," July 3, 2000.

By Jamie Lincoln Kitman

March 2, 2000

The next time you pull the family barge in for a fill-up, check it out: The gas pumps read

“Unleaded.” You might reasonably suppose this is because naturally occurring lead has been

thoughtfully removed from the gasoline. But you would be wrong. There is no lead in gasoline

unless somebody puts it there. And, a little more than seventy-five years ago, some of America’s

leading corporations–General Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (known

nowadays as Exxon)–were that somebody. They got together and put lead, a known poison, into

gasoline, for profit.

Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Follow-ups: "Amplification," June 19, 2000 and letters exchanges:

"Lead--Balloons and Bouquets," May 15, and "Lead-Letter Office," July 3, 2000.

Lead was outlawed as an automotive gasoline additive in this country in 1986–more than sixty

years after its introduction–to enable the use of emissions-reducing catalytic converters in cars

(which are contaminated and rendered useless by lead) and to address the myriad health and

safety concerns that have shadowed the toxic additive from its first, tentative appearance on US

roads in the twenties, through a period of international ubiquity only recently ending. Since the

virtual disappearance of leaded gas in the United States (it’s still sold for use in propeller

airplanes), the mean blood-lead level of the American population has declined more than 75

percent. A 1985 EPA study estimated that as many as 5,000 Americans died annually from lead-

related heart disease prior to the country’s lead phaseout. According to a 1988 report to Congress

on childhood lead poisoning in America by the government’s Agency for Toxic Substances and

Disease Registry, one can estimate that the blood-lead levels of up to 2 million children were

reduced every year to below toxic levels between 1970 and 1987 as leaded gasoline use was

reduced. From that report and elsewhere, one can conservatively estimate that a total of about 68

million young children had toxic exposures to lead from gasoline from 1927 to 1987.

How did lead get into gasoline in the first place? And why is leaded gas still being sold in the

Third World, Eastern Europe and elsewhere? Recently uncovered documents from the archives

of the aforementioned industrial behemoths and the US government, a new skein of academic

research and a careful reading of that long-ago period’s historical record, as well as dozens of

interviews conducted by The Nation, tell the true story of leaded gasoline, a sad and sordid

commercial venture that would tiptoe its way quietly into the black hole of history if the captains

of industry were to have their way. But the story must be recounted now. The leaded gas

adventurers have profitably polluted the world on a grand scale and, in the process, have

provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other

twentieth-century corporate bad actors, for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful

by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty.

This is not just a textbook example of unnecessary environmental degradation, however. Nor is

this history important solely as a cautionary retort to those who would doubt the need for

aggressive regulation of industry, when commercial interests ask us to sanction genetically

modified food on the basis of their own scientific assurances, just as the merchants of lead once

did. The leaded gasoline story must also be read as a call to action, for the lead menace lives.

Consider:

§ the severe health hazards of leaded gasoline were known to its makers and clearly identified by

the US public health community more than seventy-five years ago, but were steadfastly denied

by the makers, because they couldn’t be immediately quantified;

§ other, safer antiknock additives–used to increase gasoline octane and counter engine “knock”–

were known and available to oil companies and the makers of lead antiknocks before the lead

additive was discovered, but they were covered up and denied, then fought, suppressed and

unfairly maligned for decades to follow;

§ the US government was fully apprised of leaded gasoline’s potentially hazardous effects and

was aware of available alternatives, yet was complicit in the cover-up and even actively assisted

the profiteers in spreading the use of leaded gasoline to foreign countries;

§ the benefits of lead antiknock additives were wildly and knowingly overstated in the

beginning, and continue to be. Lead is not only bad for the planet and all its life forms, it is

actually bad for cars and always was;

§ for more than four decades, all scientific research regarding the health implications of leaded

gasoline was underwritten and controlled by the original lead cabal–Du Pont, GM and Standard

Oil; such research invariably favored the industry’s pro-lead views, but was from the outset

fatally flawed; independent scientists who would finally catch up with the earlier work’s

infirmities and debunk them were–and continue to be–threatened and defamed by the lead

interests and their hired hands;

§ confronted in recent years with declining sales in their biggest Western markets, owing to lead

phaseouts imposed in the United States and, more recently, Europe, the current sellers of lead

additives have successfully stepped up efforts to market their wares in the less-developed world,

efforts that persist and have resulted in some countries today placing more lead in their gasoline,

per gallon, than was typically used in the West, extra lead that serves no purpose other than

profit;

§ faced with lead’s demise and their inevitable days of reckoning, these firms have used the

extraordinary financial returns that lead additive sales afford to hurriedly fund diversification

into less risky, more conventional businesses, while taking a page from the tobacco companies’

playbook and simultaneously moving to reorganize their corporate structures to shield ownership

and management from liability for blanketing the earth with a deadly heavy metal.

You can choose whether to smoke, but you can’t pick the air you breathe, even if it is

contaminated by lead particles from automobile exhaust. Seventy-five years ago, well-known

industrialists like GM’s Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering (remembered today for having

founded the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) and the powerful brothers

Pierre and Irénée du Pont added to their substantial fortunes and did the planet very dirty by

disregarding the common-sense truth that no good can come from burning a long-known poison

in internal-combustion engines.

The steady emergence of improved methodology and finer, more sensitive measuring equipment

has allowed scientists to prove lead’s tragic toll with increasing precision. The audacity of

today’s lead-additive makers’ conduct mounts with each new study weighing in against them.

Because lead particles in automobile exhaust travel in wind, rain and snow, which know no

national boundaries, lead makers and refiners who peddle leaded gasoline knowingly injure not

only the local populations using their product but men, mice and fish tens of thousands of miles

distant.

GM and Standard Oil sold their leaded gasoline subsidiary, the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, to

Albemarle Paper in 1962, while Du Pont only cleaned up its act recently, but all hope to leave

their leaded gasoline paternity a hushed footnote to their inglorious pasts. The principal maker of

lead additive today the Associated Octel Company of Ellesmere Port, England) and its foremost

salesmen (Octel and the Ethyl corporation of Richmond, Virginia) acknowledge what they see as

a political reality: Their product will one day be run out of business. But they plan to keep on

selling it in the Third World profitably until they can sell it no longer. They continue to deny

lead’s dangers while overrating its virtues, reprising the central tenets of the lead mythology

chartered by GM, Du Pont and Standard lifetimes ago.

These mighty corporations should pay Ethyl and Octel for keeping their old lies alive. They’ll

need them, in their most up-to-the-minute and media-friendly fashion: Because of the harm

caused by leaded gasoline they have been joined to a class-action suit brought in a circuit court

in Maryland against the makers of that other product of lead’s excruciating toxic reign: lead

paint. Along with the makers of lead paint and the lead trade organizations with whom they both

once worked in close concert, suppliers and champions of lead gasoline additives–Ethyl, Du Pont

and PPG–have been named as defendants in the suit.

Though the number of cases of lead poisoning has been falling nationwide, the lead dust in

exhaust spewed by automobiles in the past century will continue to haunt us in this one, coating

our roads, buildings and soil, subtly but indefinitely contaminating our homes, belongings and

food.

The Problem With Lead

Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for

nearly 3,000 years and written about by historical figures from the Greek poet and physician

Nikander and the Roman architect Vitruvius to Benjamin Franklin. Odorless, colorless and

tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and

killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not

break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears.

For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United

States in the twentieth century remains–in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living

organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times

greater than background or natural levels. Indeed, a 1983 report by Britain’s Royal Commission

on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth

century that “it is doubtful whether any part of the earth’s surface or any form of life remains

uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead.” While lead from mining, paint, smelting

and other sources is still a serious environmental problem, a recent report by the government’s

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry estimated that the burning of gasoline has

accounted for 90 percent of lead placed in the atmosphere since the 1920s. (The magnitude of

this fact is placed in relief when one considers the estimate of the US Public Health Service that

the associated health costs from a parallel problem–the remaining lead paint in America’s older

housing–total in the multibillions.)

Classical acute lead poisoning occurs at high levels of exposure, and its symptoms–blindness,

brain damage, kidney disease, convulsions and cancer–often leading, of course, to death, are not

hard to identify. The effects of pervasive exposure to lower levels of lead are more easily

miscredited; lead poisoning has been called an “aping disease” because its symptoms are so

frequently those of other known ailments. Children are the first and worst victims of leaded gas;

because of their immaturity, they are most susceptible to systemic and neurological injury,

including lowered IQs, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention

span, hyperactivity, behavioral problems and interference with growth. Because they often go

undetected for some time, such maladies are particularly insidious. In adults, elevated blood-lead

levels are related to hypertension and cardiovascular disease, particularly strokes, heart attacks

and premature deaths. Lead exposure before or during pregnancy is especially serious, harming

the mother’s own body, affecting fetal development and frequently leading to miscarriage. In the

eighties the EPA estimated that the health damages from airborne lead cost American society

billions each year. In Venezuela, where the state oil company sold only leaded gasoline until

1999, a recent report found 63 percent of newborn children with blood-lead levels in excess of

the so-called safe levels promulgated by the US government.

The Search for an Antiknock

On December 9, 1921, a young engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr., working in the laboratory

of the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, reported to his boss, Charles

Kettering, that he’d discovered that tetraethyl lead–a little-known compound of metallic lead and

one of the alkyl series, also referred to as lead tetraethyl or TEL–worked to reduce “knock” or

“pinging” in internal-combustion engines.

Tetraethyl lead was first discovered by a German chemist in 1854. A technical curiosity, it was

not used commercially on account of “its known deadliness.” It is highly poisonous, and even

casual cumulative contact with it was known to cause hallucinations, difficulty in breathing and,

in the worst cases, madness, spasms, palsies, asphyxiation and death. Still unused in 1921, sixty-

seven years after its invention, it was not an obvious choice as a gasoline additive.

In the laboratories of Charles Kettering, however, the search for a gasoline additive to cure

“knock” had been going on for some years prior to Midgley’s rediscovery of TEL. In 1911

Kettering had invented the electric self-starter–a landmark development in automotive history

that eliminated dangerous hand-cranking and enabled many Americans (particularly women) to

drive for the first time, arguably killing steam and electric cars in the process. This invention

would make “Boss” Kettering rich, famous and beloved to a nation falling in love with its

wheels. Thanks to the starter, the folksy inventor’s new firm, Dayton Engineering Laboratories

Company, or DELCO, received its first big order, for $10 million, from the upstart General

Motors Corporation, founded only three years earlier by William Crapo Durant.

GM’s 1912 Cadillac was equipped with DELCO’s self-starter and battery ignition. When

customers reported that the engine of this luxury automobile had an alarming tendency to knock–

a sharp, metallic sound hinting at damage being done inside the engine–critics blamed

Kettering’s electrical components.

Kettering was convinced, rightly, that knocking was a function of an engine’s fuel rather than

ignition problems. When Kettering and his partners sold DELCO to Durant’s GM and its new

partner–Alfred Sloan’s Hyatt Roller Bearings–in 1916, his lab was already engaged in a search

for the cure. Following the sale, this work was transferred to his new firm, the Dayton Research

Laboratories, where a newly hired assistant, Thomas Midgley, was assigned to study the problem

of engine knock.

Stabbing in the dark, Midgley got lucky quickly when he added iodine to the fuel, stopping

knock in a test engine and establishing for all time that the malady–premature combustion of the

fuel/air mixture–was connected to the explosive qualities of the fuel, what would later be called

“octane.” Iodine raised octane and cured knock; however, it was corrosive and prohibitively

expensive. Inspired by the fundamental breakthrough, Midgley nonetheless carried on with fuel

research, testing every substance he could find for antiknock properties, “from melted butter and

camphor to ethyl acetate and aluminum chloride.” Unfortunately, “most of them had no more

effect than spitting in the Great Lakes.”

The Antiknock That Got Away

Automotive engineers knew by this time that engines that didn’t knock would not only operate

more smoothly. They could also be designed to run with higher compression in the cylinders,

which would allow more efficient operation, resulting in greater fuel economy, greater power or

some harmonious combination of the two. The key was finding a fuel with higher octane.

Though octane sufficient for use in high-compression engines had been achievable since 1913

through a process called thermal cracking, the process required added expenditures on plant and

equipment, which tightfisted oil refiners didn’t relish. The nation’s fuel supply remained

resolutely low grade, a situation that troubled Kettering.

By limiting allowable compression, low-octane fuel meant cars would be burning more gasoline.

Like many visionary engineers, Kettering was enamored of conservation as a first principle. As a

businessman, he also shared persistent fears at the time that world oil supplies were running out.

Low octane and low compression meant lower gas mileage and more rapid exhaustion of a

dwindling fuel supply. Inevitably, demand for new automobiles would fade.

By 1917 Kettering and his staff had trained their octane-boosting sights on ethyl alcohol, also

known as grain alcohol (the kind you drink), power alcohol or ethanol. In tests supervised by

Kettering and Midgley for the Army Air Corps at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, researchers

concluded that alcohols were among the best antiknock fuels but were not ideal for aircraft

engines unless used as an additive, in a blend with gasoline. This undoubtedly led Kettering to

concur with an April 13, 1918, Scientific American report: “It is now definitely established that

alcohol can be blended with gasoline to produce a suitable motor fuel.”

The story of TEL’s rise, then, is very much the story of the oil companies’ and lead interests’ war

against ethanol as an octane-boosting additive that could be mixed with gasoline or, in their

worst nightmare, burned straight as a replacement for gasoline. For more than a hundred years,

Big Oil has reckoned ethanol to be fundamentally inimical to its interest, and, viewing its interest

narrowly, Big Oil might not be wrong. By contrast, GM’s subsequent antipathy to alcohol was a

profit-motivated attitude adjustment. Alcohol initially held much fascination for the company,

for good reason. Ethanol is always plentiful and easy to make, with a long history in America,

not just as a fuel additive but as a pure fuel. The first prototype internal-combustion engine in

1826 used alcohol and turpentine. Prior to the Civil War alcohol was the most widely used

illuminating fuel in the country. Indeed, alcohol powered the first engine by the German inventor

Nicholas August Otto, father of the four-stroke internal-combustion engines powering our cars

today. More important, by the time of Kettering’s antiknock inquiry, alcohol was a proven

automotive fuel.

As the automobile era picked up speed, scientific journals were filled with references to alcohol.

Tests in 1906 by the Department of Agriculture underscored its power and economy benefits. In

1907 and 1908 the US Geological Survey and the Navy performed 2,000 tests on alcohol and

gasoline engines in Norfolk, Virginia, and St. Louis, concluding that higher engine compression

could be achieved with alcohol than with gasoline. They noted a complete absence of smoke and

disagreeable odors.

Despite many attempts by Big Oil to stifle its home-grown competitor (one time-honored

gambit: lobbying legislators to pass punitive taxation thwarting alcohol’s economic viability),

power alcohol would number among its adherents several highly regarded inventors and

scientists, including Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford built his very first

car to run on what he called farm alcohol. As late as 1925, after the advent of TEL, the high

priest of American industry would predict in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor

that ethanol–“fuel from vegetation”–would be the “fuel of the future.” Four years later, early

examples of his Model A car would be equipped with a dashboard knob to adjust its carburetor

to run on gasoline or alcohol.

Ethanol made a lot of sense to a practical Ohio farm boy like Kettering. It was renewable, made

from surplus crops and crop waste, and nontoxic. It delivered higher octane than gasoline

(though it contained less power per gallon), and it burned more cleanly. By 1920, as Kettering

was aware, a US Naval Committee had concluded that alcohol-gasoline blends “withstand high

compression without producing knock.”

Higher compression was, after all, what the GM men were after. In February 1920, shortly after

joining General Motors’ employ, Thomas Midgley filed a patent application for a blend of

alcohol and cracked (olefin) gasoline, as an antiknock fuel. Later that month K.W. Zimmerschied

of GM’s New York headquarters wrote Kettering, observing that foreign use of alcohol fuel “is

getting more serious every day in connection with export cars, and anything we can do toward

building our carburetors so they can be easily adapted to alcohol will be appreciated by all.”

Kettering assured him that adaptation for alcohol fuel “is a thing which is very readily taken care

of” by exchanging metal carburetor floats for lacquered cork ones. GM was concerned (albeit

temporarily) about an imminent disruption in oil supply, and alcohol-powered cars could keep its

factories open. An internal GM report that year stated ominously, “This year will see the

maximum production of petroleum that this country will ever know.”

Ethanol on the March

In October 1921, less than two months before he hatched leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley

drove a high-compression-engined car from Dayton to a meeting of the Society of Automotive

Engineers in Indianapolis, using a gasoline-ethanol blended fuel containing 30 percent alcohol.

“Alcohol,” he told the assembled engineers, “has tremendous advantages and minor

disadvantages.” The benefits included “clean burning and freedom from any carbon

deposit…[and] tremendously high compression under which alcohol will operate without

knocking…. Because of the possible high compression, the available horsepower is much greater

with alcohol than with gasoline.”

After four years’ study, GM researchers had proved it: Ethanol was the additive of choice. Their

estimation would be confirmed by others. In the thirties, after leaded gasoline was introduced to

the United States but before it dominated in Europe, two successful English brands of gas–

Cleveland Discoll and Kool Motor–contained 30 percent and 16 percent alcohol, respectively. As

it happened, Cleveland Discoll was part-owned by Ethyl’s half-owner, Standard Oil of New

Jersey (Kool Motor was owned by the US oil company Cities Service, today Citgo). While their

US colleagues were slandering alcohol fuels before Congressional committees in the thirties,

Standard Oil’s men in England would claim, in advertising pamphlets, that ethanol-laced, lead-

free petrol offered “the most perfect motor fuel the world has ever known,” providing “extra

power, extra economy, and extra efficiency.”

For a change, the oil companies spoke the truth. Today, in the postlead era, ethanol is routinely

blended into gasoline to raise octane and as an emissions-reducing oxygenate. Race cars often

run on pure ethanol. DaimlerChrysler and Ford earn credits allowing them to sell additional gas-

guzzling sport utility vehicles by engineering so-called flex-vehicles that will run on clean-

burning E85, an 85 percent ethanol/gasoline blend. GM helped underwrite the 1999 Ethanol

Vehicle Challenge, which saw college engineering students easily converting standard GM

pickup trucks to run on E85, producing hundreds of bonus horsepower. Ethanol’s technical

difficulties have been surmounted and its cost–as an octane-boosting additive rather than a pure

fuel–is competitive with the industry’s preferred octane-boosting oxygenate, MTBE, a

petroleum-derived suspected carcinogen with an affinity for groundwater that was recently

outlawed in California. With MTBE’s fall from grace, many refiners–including Getty, which

took out a full-page ad in the New York Times congratulating itself for doing so–returned to

ethanol long after it was first developed as a clean-burning octane booster.

Enter Du Pont

In 1919 GM purchased Kettering’s Dayton research laboratory. The following year the company

installed him as vice president of research of the renamed General Motors Research Corporation.

No longer the shambling, anarchic outfit it had been under the inveterate risk-taker W.C. Durant,

GM was now to be run in the militarily precise mold of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company of

Wilmington, Delaware. Awash in a sea of gunpowder profits from World War I, the du Pont

family had been increasing its stake in GM since 1914. By 1920 it controlled more than 35

percent of GM shares and moved to pack the board, installing professional management, with the

du Pont faction taking control of the corporation’s all-powerful finance committee.

Caught short by a margin call in the recession of 1920, Durant, GM’s colorful founder, lost his

stake and was forced by the du Pont family to walk the plank (he would spend his final days

running a bowling alley). One of the clan’s craftiest patriarchs, Pierre du Pont, was coaxed from

retirement and named GM’s interim president; Alfred Sloan, who had demonstrated the

coldhearted allegiance to the bottom line the du Ponts revered, became executive vice president

preparatory to assuming the top slot. The pressure on all concerned, including Kettering and his

research division, was to make money and to make it fast.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, Sloan wrote to Kettering in September of 1920, alerting him

to the du Ponts’ new math: “Although [the Research Corporation] is not a productive unit and a

unit that is supposed to make a profit, nevertheless the more tangible result we get from it the

stronger its position will be…. It may be inferred at some future time…that we are spending too

much money down there [in Dayton] and being in a position to show what benefits had accrued

to the corporation would strengthen our position materially.”

That time would come soon enough for Kettering to deliver. An air-cooled engine he’d

championed–copper-cooled, he called it–would soon prove a costly disaster for GM. Fortunately

for him, immediately after joining GM he had given his trusted assistant Midgley two weeks to

find something to ignite the new management’s interest in funding continued fuel research.

Though it would take somewhat longer than two weeks to fire their masters’ enthusiasm,

“Midge” succeeded.

And the Winner Is…

The effect of this sudden time constraint was striking. As GM researcher and Kettering

biographer T.A. Boyd noted in an unpublished history written in 1943, Midgley’s main research

in 1919-20 had been to make alcohols out of olefins found in petroleum through reactions with

sulfuric acid. (Farm alcohol was one thing, but a patentable process for production of petroleum-

derived alcohol–a possible money-maker–was quite another, one of considerably greater interest

to the corporation.) “But in view of the verdict setting a time limit on how much further the

research for an antiknock compound might continue,” Boyd said, “work was resumed at once in

making engine tests of whatever further compounds happened to be available on the shelf of the

lab…or which could be gotten readily.”

As noted earlier, Midgley tested many compounds before isolating tetraethyl lead in December

1921. In the early days, he would attribute the discovery of TEL’s antiknock properties to “luck

and religion, as well as the application of science.” In a 1925 magazine article, he would recall

false trails with iodine, aniline, selenium and tellurium before hitting upon lead. Curiously, his

article omitted any reference to the alcohol-gasoline blend he’d patented just five years earlier.

Another oddity: The exact number of compounds tested prior to TEL’s discovery varies

dramatically in different accounts. As Professor William Kovarik of Radford University has

observed, confusion reigns in part because the lab’s day-to-day test diaries have never been

released to the public by the General Motors Institute (GMI) archive. In the words of one

archivist there, GM’s lead archives have been “sanitized.” One 1925 article in the Literary

Digest put the number at 2,500 compounds tested, while The Story of Ethyl Gasoline, a 1927

pamphlet released by a company Midgley would help found, states that 33,000 were studied.

Another time, he claimed 14,991 elements were examined, while a 1980 Ethyl corporation

statement set the number at 144. This question is important because GM’s discovery of lead’s

antiknock properties, which initially caused little internal excitement, would be hailed in popular

media and later cited in polytechnical texts as a model of rational, orderly scientific inquiry that

sought the single best answer to the knock question. A more realistic view of events is that

TEL’s re-emergence in the twenties was the result of a crude empirical potshot that was

understood to promise a landslide of earnings over time.

Apprised of Midgley’s discovery that one part TEL could be used to fortify 1,000 parts of

gasoline, Kettering proposed the name “Ethyl” for the new antiknock fluid, a mild irony in light

of both men’s longtime–and soon to fade–interest in ethyl alcohol. At researcher Boyd’s

suggestion Ethyl was dyed red. There was as yet, however, no plan to market Ethyl. Indeed, in

July 1922, seven months after TEL’s discovery, J.W. Morrison of the GM Patent Department

would encourage Midgley to “see if the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Co. have opened a valuable line

of research. Mr. Clements [the lab manager at GM] stated some time ago that it might be worth

our while to carry our investigations further on the problem of utilizing alcohols in motors. I

think he mentioned specifically combinations of alcohol and gasoline.”

From the corporation’s perspective, however, the problems with ethyl alcohol were ultimately

insurmountable and rather basic. GM couldn’t dictate an infrastructure that could supply ethanol

in the volumes that might be required. Equally troubling, any idiot with a still could make it at

home, and in those days, many did. And ethanol, unlike TEL, couldn’t be patented; it offered no

profits for GM. Moreover, the oil companies hated it, a powerful disincentive for the fledgling

GM, which was loath to jeopardize relations with these mighty power brokers. Surely the du

Pont family’s growing interest in oil and oil fields, as it branched out from its gunpowder roots

into the oil-dependent chemical business, weighed on many GM directors’ minds.

In March 1922, Pierre du Pont wrote to his brother Irénée du Pont, Du Pont company chairman,

that TEL is “a colorless liquid of sweetish odor, very poisonous if absorbed through the skin,

resulting in lead poisoning almost immediately.” This statement of early factual knowledge of

TEL’s supreme deadliness is noteworthy, for it is knowledge that will be denied repeatedly by

the principals in coming years as well as in the Ethyl Corporation’s authorized history, released

almost sixty years later. Underscoring the deep and implicit coziness between GM and Du Pont

at this time, Pierre informed Irénée about TEL before GM had even filed its patent application

for it.

The Rise of Tetraethyl Lead

With the application filed, the groundwork was laid for manufacture of TEL. An October 1922

agreement contracted Du Pont to supply GM. Signing for GM was Pierre du Pont; signing for Du

Pont: his brother Irénée. Manufacturing began in 1923 with a small operation in Dayton, Ohio,

that made 160 gallons of tetraethyl lead a day and shipped it out in one-liter bottles, each of

which would treat 300 gallons of gasoline.

In February 1923 the world’s first tankful of leaded gasoline was pumped at Refiners Oil

Company, at the corner of Sixth and Main streets, in Dayton, Ohio, from a station owned by

Kettering’s friend Willard Talbott. But four months earlier, an agitated William Mansfield Clark,

a lab director in the US Public Health Service, had written A.M. Stimson, assistant Surgeon

General at the PHS, warning that Du Pont was preparing to manufacture TEL at its plant in

Deepwater, New Jersey. It constituted a “serious menace to public health” he stated, with reports

already emerging from the plant that “several very serious cases of lead poisoning have resulted”

in pilot production.

Clark additionally speculated that widespread use of TEL would mean “on busy thoroughfares it

is highly probable that the lead oxide dust will remain in the lower stratum.” Estimating that each

gallon of gasoline burned would emit four grams of lead oxide, he worried that this would build

up to dangerous levels along heavily traveled roads and in tunnels.

Stimson was troubled enough by Clark’s letter to request that the PHS’s Division of

Pharmacology conduct investigations; unfortunately, the division’s director responded, such

trials would be too time-consuming. He suggested that the PHS rely upon industry to supply the

relevant data, a spectacularly poor plan that would amount to government policy for the next

forty years.

Perhaps spurred by Clark’s missive and Stimson’s concern, in December 1922 the US Surgeon

General, H.S. Cumming, wrote Pierre du Pont: “Inasmuch as it is understood that when

employed in gasoline engines, this substance will add a finely divided and nondiffusible form of

lead to exhaust gases, and furthermore, since lead poisoning in human beings is of the

cumulative type resulting frequently from the daily intake of minute quantities, it seems pertinent

to inquire whether there might not be a decided health hazard associated with the extensive use

of lead tetraethyl in engines.”

But the Good News Is…

The year 1923 did not begin well, then, for supporters of tetraethyl lead. In January, on account

of lead poisoning, Thomas Midgley was forced to decline speaking engagements at three

regional panels of the American Chemical Society, which had awarded him a medal for his

discovery. “After about a year’s work in organic lead,” he wrote, “I find that my lungs have been

affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air.” He repaired

to Miami.

Before leaving town, Midgley penned a reply to Cumming’s letter, which had been passed on to

him by Pierre du Pont. Although the question “had been given very serious consideration,” he

wrote, “…no actual experimental data has been taken.” Even so, Midgley assured the Surgeon

General, GM and Du Pont believed that “the average street will probably be so free from lead

that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption.” In other words, TEL, the deadly chemical

curiosity, was being brought to market without any thought or study as to its public health

implications, but rather on the hopeful hunch of a clever mechanical engineer who had just been

poisoned by lead.

Around this time, Midgley had also begun to receive letters expressing grave concern over TEL

from well-known public health and medical authorities at leading universities, including Robert

Wilson of MIT, Reid Hunt of Harvard, Yandell Henderson of Yale (America’s foremost expert

on poison gases and automotive exhaust) and Dr. Erik Krause of the Institute of Technology,

Potsdam, Germany. Krause called TEL “a creeping and malicious poison,” and he told Midgley

it had killed a member of his dissertation committee. Charles Kettering may have been

concerned by this growing chorus of TEL critics, but the early months of 1923 saw his mind

preoccupied with another matter. In May of that year, after four costly years of development,

Kettering’s beloved copper-cooled engine was abandoned as a production program, a high-

profile embarrassment within the company and the larger automotive community. “It was then,”

wrote Kettering’s research assistant and biographer, T.A. Boyd, some years later, “that his spirits

reached the lowest point in his research career.”

The abject failure of the copper-cooled engine led the fiercely proud Kettering to believe his

personal capital in the company had been terminally depleted. “Since this thing with the Copper-

Cooled Car has come up,” he wrote Alfred Sloan (who became GM’s president in 1923), “the

Laboratory has been practically isolated from Corporation activities.” Kettering’s shame was so

enormous that he tendered his resignation in a letter to Sloan. “I regret very much that this

situation has developed. I have been extremely unhappy and know that I have made you and Mr.

du Pont equally unhappy…. work here at the Laboratory, I realize, has been almost 100% failure,

but not because of the fundamental principles involved. Enough may come out of the Laboratory

to have paid for their existence but no one will care to continue in Research activities as the

situation now stands.”

‘My Dear Boss’

Sloan declined to let Kettering go. But America’s most famous automotive engineer after Henry

Ford emerged with a renewed sensitivity to the profit-making needs of his corporation. In this

regard, TEL held out an immediate lifeline. Writing Kettering from Florida in March 1923,

Midgley related a mad brainstorm whose relevance had now become fully clear to Kettering.

“My dear boss,” he began, “The way I feel about the Ethyl Gas situation is about as follows: It

looks as though we could count on a minimum of 20 percent of the gas sold in the country if we

advertise and go after the business–this at three cent gross to us from each gallon sold. I think we

ought to go after it as soon as we can without being too hasty.”

Midgley barely scratched the surface of the wealth to come. With a legal monopoly based on

patents that would provide a royalty on practically every gallon of gasoline sold for the life of its

patent, Ethyl promised to make GM shareholders–among whom the du Ponts, Alfred Sloan and

Charles Kettering were the largest–very rich. Profit-free ethanol, indeed. As Kovarik has

calculated: “With gasoline sales [in 1923] around six billion gallons per year, 20 percent would

come to about 1.2 billion gallons, and three cents gross would represent $36 million. With the

cost of production and distribution running less than one cent per gallon of treated gasoline, more

than two thirds of the $36 million would be annual gross profit. Of course, within a decade 80

percent of the then 12 billion gallon market used Ethyl, for an annual gross of almost $300

million.”

The fears of excessive hastiness expressed in Midgley’s letter were evidently allayed. In April

1923, one month after he’d performed his riveting calculations, the General Motors Chemical

Company was established to produce TEL, with Charles Kettering as president and Thomas

Midgley as vice president.

Octane, the Motorist’s Friend

Beginning in 1921, GM’s executive committee began to articulate the first principles that would

come to be known as Sloanism–that is, planned obsolescence and product differentiation through

speed, power, style and color; “a car for every purse and purpose,” as Sloan was fond of saying.

Between 1922 and the end of the decade, Sloan and his GM associates would devise marketing

strategies that would see GM overtake Ford as the world’s largest automobile manufacturer and

set the tone for the next fifty years of American automotive consumption. Central to this growth

would be an awareness that consumers were no longer looking merely for basic transportation,

which was the stock in trade of Ford’s beloved Model T. In addition to consumer financing

(which Ford opposed), Sloan was convinced that style, snob appeal and speed would help GM

steal its customers away. He was right.

Following the failure of his copper-cooled engine, Kettering rejigged his arguments for TEL for

internal–definitely not public–consumption. As it happened, the new additive could be fitted

neatly into the Sloanist equation. For while it was initially seen by Kettering and his staff as a

way to cure knock and to husband fossil-fuel supplies, the high compression it enabled in motors

was just as easily exploited to make cars faster and more powerful, thus easier to sell. Alan Loeb,

a former EPA attorney and lead historian who has examined the period closely, has neatly

summed up Kettering’s conversion: “By 1923…it was clear that Kettering’s original purpose for

the antiknock research had given way to GM’s desire to improve auto performance without

regard for its effect on fuel economy…. Kettering did not give up on efficiency and conservation

as his own ideals, but ever after he knew better than to try to push a product that would not sell.

In later years, even as Kettering’s advocacy of conservation became more and more public, it

represented GM’s true motive less and less.”

Tellingly, Ethyl’s earliest advertisements dealt solely with speed and power and invariably

neglected to mention its active ingredient: lead. Boasted a September 1927 ad that ran in

National Geographic: “As an Ethyl user, you have the benefits of greatly increased speed, more

power on hills and heavy roads. Quicker acceleration and complete elimination of ‘knock.’ But

the real high compression automobile is here at last! Ethyl gasoline has made it possible! Ride

with Ethyl in a high compression motor and get the thrill of a lifetime.”

With the advent of the Depression in the thirties, Ethyl’s advertising nodded to the economic

realities of the day but still focused on power. An ad that ran in February 1933 contains a

Norman Rockwell-esque portrait of a small boy who is complaining to his embarrassed father,

“Gee, Pop–they’re all passing you.” The accompanying text rubs it in. “They didn’t pass you

when your car was bright and new–and you still don’t like to be left behind. So just remember

this: the next best thing to a brand new car is your present car with Ethyl.”

Liftoff

With the formation of the GM Chemical Company, work on a large-scale Du Pont TEL plant

began immediately. Irénée du Pont hailed his company’s technical director, W.F. Harrington: “It

is essential that we treat this undertaking like a war order so far as making speed and producing

the output, not only in order to fulfill the terms of the contract as to time but because every day

saved means one day advantage over possible competition.”

Significantly, GM’s patent on TEL would have covered any threat from competing makers of

lead additive. Thus, as Kovarik has reasoned, the competition referred to must have been from

those who would have offered a different kind of antiknock. GM, Du Pont and TEL’s other

backers would long publicly claim there were no conceivable alternatives to the lead antiknock

additive. But the facts were otherwise. Ethanol was still out there. And GM negotiated

throughout the twenties with Germany’s I.G. Farben over an additive it made from iron carbonyl.

Then, in August 1925, Kettering himself joyously announced “Synthol,” a blended automotive

fuel of benzene and alcohol that promised to “double gas mileage.” There was, as we shall see,

an unexpected–and momentary–business need for Synthol. The point is, there were alternatives.

In a public relations coup, Ethyl leaded gasoline fueled the top three finishers at the Indianapolis

500 motor race on Memorial Day, 1923. With demand skyrocketing, Kettering signed exclusive

contracts with Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), Standard Oil of Indiana (later Amoco,

more lately merged with BP) and Gulf Oil (owned by the Mellon interests) for East Coast,

Midwest and Southern distribution, respectively, of leaded gasoline.

Tetraethyl Death

In August, Du Pont’s TEL plant opened at Deepwater, New Jersey, across the Delaware River

from Wilmington. Less than thirty days would pass before the first of several TEL poisoning

deaths of workers there would occur. Not surprisingly, given Du Pont’s stranglehold on all local

media within its domain along the Delaware, the deaths went unreported.

Even so, news of these and similar deaths would inevitably come out. Realizing that its own

medical research would be less than credible then, and having been turned down by reputable

academics and the Public Health Service in its search for consultants to help “refute any false

propaganda,” GM hurriedly contracted the US Bureau of Mines in September 1923 to explore

the dangers of TEL. Even by the lax standards of its day, the bureau was a docile corporate

servant, with not an adversarial bone in its body. It saw itself as in the mining promotion

business, with much of its scientific work undertaken in collaboration with industry. The

bureau’s presumptive harmlessness notwithstanding, to its written agreement with GM was

nonetheless added a remarkable proviso, that the bureau “refrain from giving out the usual press

and progress reports during the course of the work, as [GM] feels that the newspapers are apt to

give scare headlines and false impressions before we definitely know what the influence of the

material will be.”

Indicative of the bureau leadership’s fundamental outlook was an exchange between the

superintendent of its Pittsburgh field station, where the TEL investigation was being conducted,

and the bureau’s chief chemist, S.C. Lind. By letter, Lind had objected to the use of the trade

name “Ethyl” when referring to tetraethyl lead gasoline.

“Of course their [GM officials] object in doing so is fairly clear, and among other things they are

not particularly desirous of having the name ‘lead’ appear in this case. That is alright from the

standpoint of the General Motors Company but it is quite a question in my mind as to whether

the Bureau of Mines would be justified in adopting this name so early in the game.”

The superintendent replied that omission of “the use of the word ‘lead’ in the interbureau

correspondence” was intentional to prevent leaks to the papers. “If it should happen to get some

publicity accidentally, it would not be so bad if the word ‘lead’ were omitted as this term is apt to

prejudice somewhat against its use.”

Indeed, lead had acquired a bad name by 1920, as scientific and public awareness of its supreme

deadliness as an occupational and pediatric hazard was increasing. Then, in April 1924, two GM

employees engaged in the manufacture of TEL at a pilot plant in Dayton also died of lead

poisoning. Large numbers of nonfatal poisonings were noted at this time. Thomas Midgley was

said to be “depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program.”

But Kettering, emerging from his copper-cooled funk, wouldn’t slow down. Two months later,

he would urge Du Pont to step up production. At the same time, seeking even greater control

over Bureau of Mines test results, GM stipulated that “all manuscripts, before publication, will

be submitted to the Company for comment and criticism.

By any measure, the TEL constituency had experienced a run of rum luck, and in June 1924 GM

president Sloan, “gravely concerned about the poison hazard” and deaths at TEL plants in

Dayton and Deepwater, approved the formation of a medical committee, with J. Gilman

Thompson, consulting physician to Standard Oil of New Jersey (which had been marketing Ethyl

and dabbling in its manufacture), as chairman. Summing up the gloomy feeling all around at this

time, Du Pont chairman Irénée du Pont wrote Sloan at GM that TEL “may be killed by a better

substitute or because of its poisonous character or because of its [destructive] action on the

engine.”

Following its investigation, GM’s medical committee delivered what was apparently a negative

and highly cautionary report on TEL. But Irénée du Pont, having undergone some sort of

conversion or, possibly, having remembered his family’s lifelong devotion to profit at any cost,

wrote Sloan on August 29, 1924, and told him not to worry: “I have read the doctors’ report and

am not disturbed by the severity of the findings.” Another product his firm made–nitroglycerin–

was even more hazardous to make, du Pont added breezily, while lead dust from car exhaust was

but nothing compared to erosion from lead paint. Years later, this would become a major plank

of TEL supporters’ defense.

For some unknown reason, the report of Sloan’s blue-ribbon medical committee, like many

original documents referenced in GM reports on TEL, is not available in the company’s public

archives.

Hello, Ethyl

Meanwhile, Standard Oil of New Jersey had developed a faster, cheaper method of synthesizing

TEL. In August 1924 production began in a makeshift works at its Bayway plant in Elizabeth,

New Jersey. GM still held the TEL patent, but Standard now had the better manufacturing

technology and a patent of its own to prove it.

To the apparent surprise of some at Du Pont, which had not been producing the fluid fast enough

for GM’s liking, the oil company (one of twenty-seven companies formed by the 1911 breakup

of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust) and the automobile company formed a joint venture, which

they called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. Why, one wonders, would GM deign to form Ethyl,

a new company, with Standard? “In the first place,” Sloan would testify in a 1952 antitrust suit,

“I recognized that General Motors’ organization had no competence whatsoever in chemical

manufacture. We were mechanical people dealing in metal processing.” The deaths at Dayton

would certainly support this modest assessment. Sloan would also later record his view that

management should not get sidetracked on noncore businesses. But there were clearly bushels of

money to be made. Sloan had by now fully cottoned to an essential fact about his company’s new

lead additive patent. As the management expert P.F. Drucker described it many years later, “GM,

in effect, made money on almost every gallon of gasoline sold, by anyone.”

In one of its first official acts, the newly formed Ethyl Gasoline Corporation evinced renewed

sensitivity to spin (not to mention a justifiably elevated level of paranoia) by insisting that its

contract with the Bureau of Mines be modified yet again, to reflect that “before publication of

any papers or articles by your Bureau, they should be submitted to them [Ethyl] for comment,

criticism, and approval.” Thus, as the public health historians David Rosner and Gerald

Markowitz have observed, the newly formed Ethyl Corporation was given “veto power over the

research of the United States government.”

Death by Loony Gas

Du Pont would supply most of Ethyl’s TEL requirements for years to come, but, according to a

letter written by Alfred Sloan to Irénée du Pont in the fall of 1924, in an accommodation to

Standard Oil that firm had been permitted to maintain a small “semiworks” at its Bayway

refinery. Later, Du Pont engineers would express serious reservations about the safety of

Standard’s facility. An internal 1936 Du Pont history would recount that the company was

“greatly shocked at the manifest danger of the equipment and methods [and] at the inadequate

safety precautions” at the Standard facility, but their suggestions were “waved aside.”

Unfortunate it was.

On October 26, 1924, the first of five workers who would die in quick succession at Standard

Oil’s Bayway TEL works perished, after wrenching fits of violent insanity; thirty-five other

workers would experience tremors, hallucinations, severe palsies and other serious neurological

symptoms of organic lead poisoning. In total, more than 80 percent of the Bayway staff would

die or suffer severe poisoning. News of these deaths was the first that many Americans heard of

leaded gasoline–although it would take a few days, as the New York City papers and wire

services rushed to cover a mysterious industrial disaster that Standard stonewalled and GM

declined to delve into.

Confusion and panic marked the headlines, with reporters forced to travel to New Jersey to track

a story they’d probably have noted in a lightly rewritten press release if Standard had appeared

more forthcoming. On October 30, days after the first Bayway death, the press was at last invited

to Standard’s New York City headquarters for an afternoon session of long-overdue,

professionally crafted spin control. Thomas Midgley had been rushed to 26 Broadway from

Dayton and would address the corps. But first, Standard’s medical consultant, J. Gilman

Thompson, presented them with a typewritten statement, supplying the company’s most sculpted

telling of recent history yet:

[TEL’s] recently discovered use for greatly promoting the efficiency of gasoline engines has led

to its manufacture on a commercial scale through processes still more or less in a stage of

development. This has occasioned unforeseen accidents…. One of these has been the sudden

escape of fumes from large retorts, and the inhalation of such fumes gives rise to acute

symptoms, particularly congestion of the brain, producing a condition not unlike delirium

tremens. Although there is lead in the compound, these acute symptoms are wholly unlike those

of chronic lead poisoning such as painters often have.

“There is no obscurity whatever about the effects of the poison and characterizing the

substance as ‘mystery gas’ or ‘insanity gas’ is grossly misleading.

Asked to assess their liability to families of men who said they were not warned of the dangers,

Standard Oil officials said “the rejection of many men as physically unfit to engage in the work

of the Bayway plant, daily physical examinations, constant admonitions as to wearing rubber

gloves and using gas masks and not wearing away from the plant clothing worn during work

hours should have been sufficient indication to every man in the plant that he was engaged ‘in a

man’s undertaking.'”

The falsity and cruelty of Standard’s position were manifest, the ironies rife. First, Standard

wasn’t in experimental production. It was making TEL to sell. Second, its stony silence alone

had led to stories in the press about a “mystery” gas, because reporters learned that TEL had

been dubbed “loony gas” from Bayway workers whom they interviewed after being brushed off

by the company brass. Finally, the escapes of gas weren’t sudden, as claimed, but ongoing, the

poisoning cumulative. The doctors at Reconstruction Hospital had told the Herald Tribune that

violent insanity was “brought on by the gradual infiltration of lead in their systems.”

The day’s true highlight, however, would be Midgley’s presentation. The celebrated engineer

and Ethyl VP, who had only recently been forced to leave work to recover from lead poisoning,

proposed to demonstrate that TEL was not dangerous in small quantities, by rubbing some of it

on his hands. Midgley was fond of this exhibition and would repeat it elsewhere, washing his

hands thoroughly in the fluid and drying them on his handkerchief. “‘I’m not taking any chance

whatever,’ he said. ‘Nor would I take any chance doing that every day.'” The New York World

cited unbelievable dispatches from Detroit claiming that Midgley “frequently bathed” in TEL to

prove its safety to skeptics within the industry.

Ethyl Adrift

The response of local governments and public health officials to the Bayway disaster was swift

and stern. The day of Midgley’s peculiar demonstration, the New York City Board of Health

banned the sale of TEL-enhanced gasoline, saying that “such mixtures of gasoline, containing

lead or other deleterious substances, may be liable to prove detrimental and dangerous to the

health and lives of the community, particularly when released as exhaust from motor vehicles.”

Within a matter of days Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the State of New Jersey would ban gasoline

containing the lead additive. Ethyl would continue to be sold in the Midwest, but elsewhere on

the East Coast its use was unofficially discouraged by authorities.

In early November 1924, after the fifth Bayway worker died, the Bureau of Mines study on TEL

was released (remember that GM and then Ethyl had reserved for themselves the right to approve

the timing of its release). Not surprisingly, the bureau’s report, based on limited animal testing it

had conducted, gave the substance a clean bill of health. The New York Times, which had

decided as editorial policy to support the use of TEL, served up just the sort of front-page

headline Ethyl hoped for: “No Peril to Public Seen in Ethyl Gas/Bureau of Mines Reports after

Long Experiments with Motor Exhausts/More Deaths Unlikely.”

Yandell Henderson of Yale and others assailed the Bureau of Mines study as a hopelessly

shoddy investigation financed by an interested party, Ethyl, and bemoaned Washington’s

antiregulatory climate. The bureau had “investigated the danger to the public of acute lead

poisoning,” he noted derisively,

and had failed even to take into account the possibility that the atmosphere might be polluted to

such an extent along automobile thoroughfares that those who worked or lived along such streets

would gradually absorb lead in sufficient quantities to poison them in the course of months….

Perhaps if leaded gasoline kills enough people soon enough to impress the public, we may

get from Congress a much-needed law and appropriation for the control of harmful substances

other than foods. But it seems more likely that the conditions will grow worse so gradually and

the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously (for this is the nature of the

disease) that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have

been sold that can run only on that fuel before the public and the Government awaken to the

situation….

This is probably the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced

the American public. It is the question whether scientific experts are to be consulted, and the

action of Government guided by their advice, or whether, on the contrary, commercial interests

are to be allowed to subordinate every other consideration to that of profit.

Echoing the fears of PHS lab director William Clark more than two years earlier, Henderson had

clearly isolated the greatest threat of leaded gasoline–not the severe cases of industrial poisoning

that had grabbed the headlines but the slow, unrelenting low-level exposure that was sure to

occur as the use of leaded gasoline spread. As we shall see, the industry would use this

dichotomy–accidental deaths at the plant versus insidious poisoning–to its advantage. The former

risk could be acknowledged because it could be prevented, while the latter was doubted, denied

and endlessly debated.

In years to come, the federal government would do much to help the lead interests actively

across a variety of fields, but the greatest assistance offered was an act of omission: a signal

failure to arrange for independent examination of the effects of automotive lead emissions on the

public health. By 1924 the government’s allegiance and probity were already in question. As

C.W. Deppé, owner of the Lilliputian Deppé Motors, put it in a letter to the Secretary of the

Interior, Hubert Work: “May I be pardoned if I ask you frankly now, does the Bureau of Mines

exist for the benefit of Ford and the G.M. Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey,

and other oil companies parties to the distribution of the Ethyl Lead Dopes, or is the Bureau

supposed to be for the public benefit and in protection of life and health?”

Enter the Surgeon General

Three months after the Bayway disaster, a grand jury acquitted Standard Oil of criminal

responsibility for the tragedy despite the fact that, as the New York Times stated in summarizing

the grand jury’s findings: “The report found that the deaths were directly due to

poisoning…[and] recommended that before it resumes operations the company try to perfect

some machinery by which ethyl gas can be manufactured without endangering life.”

This was good news for Ethyl’s backers, but strangely at variance with the views of Standard’s

own partners. As Du Pont’s internal history of 1936 concluded:

“Notwithstanding…foreknowledge at the peril, the precautions taken in the small manufacturing

operation at Bayway were grossly inadequate.” And GM took a dim view of the Standard

operation as well. Ferris Hurd, a GM attorney testifying in the government’s 1953 antitrust suit

against Du Pont, summarized events:

[Standard] put up a plant that lasted two months and killed five people and practically wiped out

the rest of the plant. The disaster was so bad that the state of New Jersey entered the picture and

issued an order that Standard could never go back into the manufacture of [tetraethyl lead]

without the permission of the state of New Jersey. In fact, the furor over it was so great that the

newspapers took it up, and they misrepresented it, and instead of realizing that the danger was in

the manufacture, they got to thinking that the danger was exposure of the public in the use of it,

and the criticism of its use was so great that it was banned in many cities and they had to close

down the manufacture and sale of Ethyl.

Of course, there was a danger to the public in the use of Ethyl, but the public wouldn’t know it

for decades, thanks in large part to the institutional inability and temperamental disinclination of

the federal government at this time to do anything more than smile upon new technologies and

corporate incursions into new and lucrative markets. The wave of publicity surrounding the

Bayway disaster had left Ethyl on the defensive, however. The company knew it would be up to

government to set matters right.

A Gift of God?

Today business school students carefully analyze the corporate response to the scare caused by a

small batch of tainted Tylenol and widely hail it as a work of genius. Yet it was nothing

compared with Ethyl’s road back from disaster, skillfully negotiated with a product that was a

deadly poison from the get-go. Ethyl, to use the modern argot, had an aggressive plan and made

it stick. You might say it was one of the most brilliant exercises in co-branded damage control

ever.

For on Christmas Eve, 1924, Charles Kettering, Frank Howard of Standard and Du Pont chief

engineer W.F. Harrington paid a private visit to Surgeon General Hugh Cumming to request that

the Public Health Service hold public hearings on TEL. Cumming readily agreed. As Du Pont’s

private history of 1936 would note, “In the prevailing state of strong prejudice and excited fears,

the new industry was fortunate in having the question of the health risk in the use of tetraethyl

lead actively taken up…by the US Public Health Service.”

On May 4, 1925, in an act exquisitely timed and brilliantly crafted to the right tone of

seriousness for the proceedings, Ethyl publicly withdrew its product from the market. On May 20

eighty-seven participants convened in the Butler Building at Third and B Streets, in Washington,

DC, along with a dozen reporters, for the Surgeon General’s conference. Conspicuously absent

was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose agency was charged with oversight of the PHS.

Nowhere was it reported that Mellon family interests controlled Gulf Oil, which had recently

acquired an exclusive Ethyl distributorship.

At the hearing, Standard’s Frank Howard (soon to be an Ethyl director) uttered the memorable

pronouncement that TEL was “a gift of God” that conscience and the march of human progress

compelled GM to exploit.

Our problem is not that simple. We cannot quite act on a remote probability. We are engaged in

the General Motors Corporation in the manufacture of automobiles, and in the Standard Oil

Company in the manufacture and refining of oil. On these things our present industrial

civilization is supposed to depend. I might refer to the comment made at the end of the war–that

the Allies floated to victory on a sea of oil–which is probably true….

Now as a result of some 10 years’ [sic] research on the part of The General Motors

Corporation and 5 years’ research by the Standard Oil Co., or a little bit more, we have this

apparent gift of God–of 3 cubic centimeters of tetraethyl lead–which will permit that gallon of

gasoline…to go perhaps 50 percent further…

What is our duty under the circumstances? Should we throw this thing aside? Should we say,

‘No, we will not use it,’ in spite of the efforts of the government and the General Motors

Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. toward developing this very thing, which is a certain

means of saving petroleum? Because some animals die and some do not die in some

experiments, shall we give this thing up entirely?

Frankly, it is a problem that we do not know how to meet. We cannot justify ourselves in our

consciences if we abandon the thing. I think it would be an unheard-of blunder if we should

abandon a thing of this kind merely because of our fears. Possibilities cannot be allowed to

influence us to such an extent as that in this matter.

(Many years later, Howard would be forced to relinquish his Standard post by the Federal Trade

Commission for collaborating with Nazi Germany, but he would retain his seat at Ethyl.)

Ethyl sales manager A.S. Maxwell got even more carried away, telling a reporter that engines

would run so efficiently with leaded gas that GM was developing an engine that “will triple the

best mileage a gallon of gasoline will give today.” Actually, while the high compression Ethyl

permitted–like ethanol or any octane booster–might have offered fuel-economy benefits, average

fuel economy in the United States fell steadily from 1925, the year of Ethyl’s introduction,

through the seventies, when cars shrank and unleaded fuel became the standard. In 1974 GM’s

corporate average fuel economy had fallen to a near-comical 12.2 miles per gallon. By 1987,

after unleaded became predominant and catalytic converters a standard, the sales/registered-fleet

average for cars sold in the United States had climbed to 27.3 miles per gallon. Yet TEL

defenders to this day cite conservation as its key benefit.

The Conference Adjourns

America’s automotive population was multiplying exponentially, yet the Surgeon General’s

conference spent six hours and forty-five minutes deliberating on what Yandell Henderson had

prophetically called “probably the greatest single question in the field of public health that has

ever faced the American public” and reached no conclusion. Instead, it voted unanimously on a

motion by Dr. Matthias Nicoll, New York State Commissioner of Health, to place the question of

tetraethyl lead in the hands of Cumming and a seven-member committee of experts to be

appointed by him, with orders to report back by January 1, 1926. And it commended Ethyl for

withdrawing its product while the question of its effect on the public health was still unsettled.

Awkwardly for Ethyl, soon after the conference ended but months before the Surgeon General’s

newly impaneled committee could complete its study, details emerged about eight more TEL-

related deaths and more than 300 injuries at Du Pont’s sinister Deepwater plant. Six square miles

that lit up the sky at night, Deepwater was one of the country’s most active ports, yet it was

nowhere to be found on nautical maps. Often referred to publicly by Du Pont as a dye works, it

was rather a complex of poison-gas works, producing phosgene and chlorine gases as well as the

lethal benzol series. Deepwater had no legal government–just Du Pont and its private police

force. Dismissing the deaths, a Du Pont spokesman said at the time, “It is a fact that we have a

great deal of trouble inducing the men to be cautious. We have to protect them against

themselves.” (You can still see Deepwater today at the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike,

but it stopped producing TEL in the nineties.)

Happily for the du Ponts and the other lead interests, on January 19, 1926, the special committee

appointed by Surgeon General Cumming found “no good grounds” for prohibiting the sale of

Ethyl gasoline: “So far as the committee could ascertain all the reported cases of fatalities and

serious injuries in connection with the use of tetraethyl lead have occurred either in the process

of manufacture of this substance or in the procedures of blending and ethylizing.”

The committee reviewed the evidence of studies it had conducted in Ohio on 252 workers

exposed to lead in their occupations as chauffeurs and garage men. While the committee noted “a

greater storage of lead in the bodies of those exposed to ethyl gasoline” and lead in the dust of

garages dispensing ethyl, nothing conclusive could be established in the short time given to it.

So, although the newspapers would miss the distinction–the New York Times, for instance,

headlined it “Report: No Danger in Ethyl Gasoline”–the committee had merely concluded that

TEL could be manufactured without the loss of life. It did not give tetraethyl lead a clean bill of

health or settle the question of its effect on the public health. In fact, it cautioned:

It remains possible that if the use of leaded gasolines becomes widespread, conditions may arise

very different from those studied by us which would render its use more of a hazard than would

appear to be the case from this investigation. Longer experience may show that even such slight

storage of lead…may lead eventually in susceptible individuals to recognizable or to chronic

degenerative diseases of a less obvious character….

In view of such possibilities the committee feels that the investigation begun under their direction

must not be allowed to lapse…. The vast increase in the number of automobiles throughout the

country makes the study of all such questions a matter of real importance from the standpoint of

public health, and the committee urges strongly that a suitable appropriation be requested from

Congress for the continuance of these investigations under the supervision of the Surgeon

General of the Public Health Service.

While proposing that the sale of leaded gasoline should go forward, regulated by the Surgeon

General, the committee passed a resolution calling on the Public Health Service to conduct

further studies. Separately, the president of the Society of Automotive Engineers called for

additional investigations concerning lead’s possible relation to sterility. And the American

Chemical Society, which might have been supposed a lockstep supporter of Ethyl, proposed

around this time that increased governmental regulation over chemicals “is a subject worthy of

further discussion.”

Thus, even the industry’s paid scientists were uneasy about the use of lead in gasoline. Yet none

of these calls for further government action were ever acted upon, and it was this failure that

gave Ethyl its opening. The PHS never conducted the studies, the Surgeon General never lobbied

Congress to pay for them and, for the next forty years, all research on TEL’s health impact

would be underwritten by GM, Standard Oil, Du Pont, Ethyl and lead-industry trade

associations. With the credulity-stretching statement of an Ethyl spokesman that the only

purpose of GM and Standard Oil–“two of the largest units in the automobile and oil industry”–

was “to conserve a vital natural resource,” the company welcomed the committee’s report as

total vindication. “We plan to resume operations,” Ethyl announced without delay the day of the

report’s release. In May 1926, one year after the sale of TEL-laced gasoline was suspended,

signs appeared in gas stations: “Ethyl is back.”

But There Is No Alternative

Misrepresenting the Surgeon General’s committee report findings and glossing over its call for

further study, Ethyl medical consultant Robert Kehoe recalled in a 1928 article the government’s

abdication of its charge: “As it appeared from [the committee’s] investigation that there was no

evidence of immediate danger to the public health, it was thought that these necessarily

expensive studies should not be repeated at present, at public expense, but that they should be

continued at the expense of the industry most concerned, subject, however, to the supervision of

the Public Health Service.” His own study, Kehoe wrote unsurprisingly, failed to “show any

evidence for the existence of such hazards.”

Others were less sanguine about the committee’s report and Kehoe’s summary of the evidence.

Committee member Dr. David Edsall, dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health, called the

report incomplete and “half-baked.” C.E.A. Winslow of Yale recommended that “the search for

an investigation of antiknock compounds be continued intensively with the object of securing

effective agents containing less poisonous metals (such as iron, nickel, tin, etc.) or no metals at

all.” Winslow unsuccessfully sought to have the committee mention alternatives to TEL in its

final report, forwarding this recommendation to the PHS, along with correspondence from the

Ford Motor Company. One letter to Winslow, which is missing from the PHS files in the

National Archive but present in his Yale University archive, dated August 15, 1925, reads:

Alcohols for motor fuel

Further to my letter of June 19th:

You may probably have observed the production of synthetic alcohol as brought by the Badische

Anilin and Soda Fabrik [BASF of I.G. Farben], now being produced in Germany at the rate of

60,000 gallons per month. Such alcohol is reported to be produced for between 10 cents and 20

cents per gallon and has much promise as a mixture with hydrocarbon [gasoline] fuels to

eliminate knocking and carbonization.

[signed] Wm. H. Smith, Ford Motor Co.

Surgeon General Cumming was not interested in alternatives to lead, even though proof of their

existence ought to have immediately thrown the veracity of all Ethyl utterances into question.

Speaking in August 1925, for instance, Thomas Midgley had told a meeting of scientists, “So far

as science knows at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can

bring about these [antiknock] results, which are of vital importance to the continued economic

use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard

rests in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified.”

Midgley had conveniently overlooked his earlier, high-profile endorsement of ethanol, as would

Kettering and the entire US press corps. Kettering was also forgetting Synthol, the octane-

boosting alternative he had publicized just months earlier when it looked like Ethyl might be

forced to close shop. With the government’s de facto seal of approval in hand for TEL, Kettering

never again mentioned Synthol. Summarizing his remarks before the Surgeon General’s

committee, the New York Times reported: “The experience of the company does not offer any

promise that any such cheap and efficient anti-knock can be discovered to replace the lead.”

Uncle Sam Lends a Hand

Far from heeding his committee’s call for the initiation of further studies on the effects of

widespread use of tetraethyl lead, the Surgeon General thrust himself quickly into the role of

international cheerleader for Ethyl’s lead gasoline additive. In 1928 England’s Daily Mail quoted

British scientists voicing fear over the potential public health hazard posed by TEL, which was

soon to be introduced to the British market by the Anglo-American oil company brand Pratt’s.

Ethyl’s new president, Earle Webb, apprised Surgeon General Cumming of this development and

received a warm, familiar response. “Your courtesy in keeping us informed of such

developments is helpful and I am grateful for its continuance,” Cumming replied, before

contacting the British ministry.

Soon thereafter, England’s Ministry of Health would give TEL a clean bill of health, referring to

American findings. This would be hard to jibe with a soon-to-be-published report in the British

Medical Journal on “the slow, subtle, insidious saturation of the system by infinitesimal doses of

lead extending over a long period of time,” but Cumming wasn’t through yet.

Foreshadowing years of sterling service on behalf of Ethyl, the Surgeon General, the nation’s

highest-ranking medical officer, would put pen to paper again in 1928, encouraging New York

City sanitary officials to lift the city’s ban on the use of TEL-laced gasoline. “There are no good

grounds” for the ban, he implored them. In 1931 Cumming would further assist Ethyl’s overseas

marketing efforts. Cabling the PHS offices from an international conference in Paris, the

Surgeon General directed his minions to send the Swiss minister of health favorable reports on

Ethyl.

In 1932 the du Pont family would temporarily shift party allegiance and support to Franklin

Delano Roosevelt’s presidential bid with a sizable contribution to his campaign fund. The

Democratic Administration was swift to return the favor. A year after FDR’s inauguration, the

Surgeon General would busy himself writing letters of introduction for Ethyl officials to public

health counterparts in foreign countries.

“This will introduce you to Mr. E.W. Webb, President of the Ethyl Gasoline Corp.” the letters

began. Cumming helpfully assured recipients that Webb had consulted with the PHS and that the

PHS had found Ethyl an excellent product and given it a clean bill of health. He also fired off

missives advancing Ethyl’s cause with pesky state legislatures and public health authorities in

the United States who were erecting regulatory hurdles.

By 1936 Ethyl fluid would be added to 90 percent of gasoline sold in America–a resounding

commercial success. But even this would not be enough. Responding to a complaint lodged by

Ethyl that year, the Federal Trade Commission issued a restraining order preventing competitors

from criticizing leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. Ethyl gasoline, the FTC order

read, “is entirely safe to the health of motorists and the public…and is not a narcotic in its effect,

a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general

public.” The FTC’s action on Ethyl’s behalf came in the wake of an ad by the makers of

unleaded Cushing Gasoline, who meekly proposed, “It stands on its own merits and needs no

dangerous chemicals–hence you can offer it to your customers without doubt or fear.”

Ethylized Science

Dr. Robert Kehoe of the University of Cincinnati, Ethyl’s chief medical consultant, would

express the opinion following the inconclusive 1926 report of the Surgeon General’s committee

(of which he was a member) that there was no basis for concluding that leaded fuels posed any

health threat whatsoever. And while it is true that tetraethyl lead’s opponents could point in 1924

to no exact scientific test of leaded gasoline emissions as incontrovertible proof of their hazards,

there was a large body of evidence, dating back 3,000 years, that lead is poison.

Though the principals must surely have been aware of this historical evidence, it will suffice to

recap merely a few of the contemporaneous scientific descriptions of lead’s poisonous effects. In

1910, for instance, Alice Hamilton completed a ground-breaking and widely reported study of

the lead industries for the State of Illinois, finding pervasive worker poisoning and conditions

markedly worse than in European industry. In 1914 Americans Henry Thomas and Kenneth

Blackfan detailed pediatric lead-poisoning death in the case of a boy who ate white-lead paint

bitten off a crib railing. By 1921, the year of Midgley’s discovery of TEL as an octane-boosting

gasoline additive, the weight of the evidence was such that America’s National Lead Company,

sworn enemy of the antilead movement, was forced to admit grudgingly that its product was

indeed a poison, in all its many forms (e.g., carbonate of lead, lead oxides and sulfate and sulfide

of lead). The following year, the League of Nations would recommend banning white-lead paints

for interior use on health grounds, as many European countries had already done. Establishing a

pattern of tolerance for this most dangerous element, the United States declined to adopt the

league’s resolution.

The bankruptcy of TEL supporters’ medical opinion was exposed at the time by Yandell

Henderson and others. Harvard’s Dr. Edsall testified at the Surgeon General’s conference:

For 100 years and more observations have been made as to the effect of having a noteworthy

amount of lead dust around in any occupation…. It is not a question, then, whether there is or is

not a hazard…. I am disposed to believe that the hazard is a noteworthy one. How severe I am

not prepared to say. The only way in which one can determine how serious it is would be

through a very large number of extremely carefully carried-out observations as to what the

effects are upon a large number of human beings.

By 1928, emboldened by a refreshingly compliant government and TEL’s effective victory

before the Surgeon General, National Lead and St. Joseph’s Lead would form the Lead

Industries Association to take back the ground ceded with National Lead’s 1921 admission. “Of

late the lead industries have been receiving much undesirable publicity,” LIA reminded its

members, as if it had forgotten in the intervening years that its product was a deadly poison. For

years to come, the LIA, on whose board Du Pont and Ethyl officers served, would carefully

gather, fund, support and disseminate propaganda supporting its pro-lead views, fighting all who

would stand in its way. This disinformation, along with the lack of an adequate regulatory

framework and the expense and difficulty of scientifically proving lead’s insidious impact–

bought manufacturers of lead paint and lead gasoline more than fifty years of unjust deserts.

The Kehoe Rule

Ethyl president Earle Webb once listed Robert Kehoe as one of three men without whom Ethyl

could not have done what it did, and surely this must be so. Hired by Kettering in 1924 on behalf

of GM to study hazards of TEL manufacturing plants, the young toxicologist quickly

demonstrated the unerring instinct for pleasing one’s masters that guarantees one employment of

a more lasting nature. In 1925 he was appointed chief medical consultant of the Ethyl

Corporation and remained in the post until his retirement in 1958. But it was in Kehoe’s day job,

as the outspoken director of the Kettering Laboratory–founded with an initial $130,000 gift from

GM, Du Pont and Ethyl at the University of Cincinnati, where the lead industry paid Kehoe’s

salary for half a century–that he really rose to the challenge of promoting TEL. Against Kehoe’s

lab and decades of its pseudo-science, the general and unfunded concerns of the public health

community were doomed for close to fifty years.

As Kehoe told a Senate committee with rare accuracy in 1966, “at present, this [Kettering]

Laboratory is the only source of new information on this subject [occupational and public health

standards for lead] and its conclusions have a wide influence in this country and abroad in

shaping the point of view and the activities, with respect to this question, of those who are

responsible for industrial and public hygiene.” Working on Ethyl’s behalf and as a consultant to

the lead industry until shortly before his death in 1992, at 99, Kehoe put in exceptionally good

innings. (His lab would also certify the safety of the refrigerant Freon, subject of another

environmentally insensitive GM patent that would earn hundreds of millions before it was

outlawed.)

Summing up the findings of a lifetime, Kehoe told Congress that he and his colleagues “had been

looking for 30 years for evidence of bad effects from leaded gasoline in the general population

and had found none.” The credibility of his research had already been undercut and would soon

be destroyed. But for many years, Kehoe’s findings had been vouched for by semi-private

organizations, including the American Public Health Association and the American Medical

Association. Although they never undertook to investigate or independently verify his findings,

their lap-dog approvals served to bulk up the scholarship in a field that was sparsely scholared.

Kehoe’s central belief–criticized by medical authorities from Yale, Harvard and Columbia at the

Surgeon General’s original 1925 conference and thoroughly discredited today, though still

embraced by the lead-additive industry–was that lead appeared naturally in the human body; that

the high blood-lead levels his test subjects exhibited were normal and healthy. In fact,

independent researchers later realized, Kehoe’s control patients–the ones who wouldn’t be

exposed to leaded gas in his studies–were invariably already saturated with lead, which had the

effect of making exposed persons’ high lead load appear less worrisome. Such later findings

confirmed the assertions of Yandell Henderson and others who criticized Kehoe’s methodology

in 1925 before the Surgeon General’s conference. Harvard’s Dr. Edsall had reminded the

Surgeon General, “In spite of what Dr. Kehoe has just said, I think that his work will have to be

neglected for the reason that the finding of lead in such a large proportion of control people

means that however carefully these observations were made there was something wrong

technically.”

Late in his career, Kehoe contended that lead levels in gasoline could–and should–be raised.

In recent years, a new generation of academics has singled out Robert Kehoe as the father of a

rule, or paradigm, of profound importance, one that was to govern American industry and its

parade of hazardous products for much of the twentieth century. By relying on what Jerome

Nriagu of the University of Michigan has called the cascading uncertainty rule (“There is always

uncertainty to be found in a world of imperfect information”), the lead industry and makers and

marketers of TEL gasoline additives were able to argue in 1925: “You say it’s dangerous. We

say it’s not. Prove us wrong.” (Or, as Nriagu prefers, “Show me the data.”) They still do.

As a result, Ethyl had its cake and ate it, several times. If the company’s substance checked out

as safe, then it would have been shown to have behaved responsibly. If not, it would take an

eternity to prove, during which time the company could keep challenging test results and calling

for more data. “Both possible outcomes,” the historian Alan Loeb has written, “accommodated

Ethyl. The general public was dealt all the risk and Ethyl and its owners were insulated from

responsibility. To the extent that there was a health consequence, the Kehoe rule placed the

burden upon the public.”

In the past fifty years, nuclear power, tobacco, chemical, asbestos, coal, pesticide and automobile

interests have adopted strategies similar to the one developed by Kehoe. Clutching most of the

technology and all of the research capital in their own hands, they’ll say “Prove us wrong, and

we’ll change.” But confronted with damning evidence, they’ll repeatedly challenge the

methodology of the studies or the bias of researchers. All of which takes time. When these

defenses fail, the whole notion of extrapolating from test results on animals might be questioned.

As Professor Herbert Needleman of the University of Pittsburgh has observed, because toxins are

not tested on humans, this effectively means that no agent can ever be demonstrated as toxic to

industry’s satisfaction.

Today, application of the Kehoe Rule has special meaning, as multinational corporations seek to

introduce myriad genetically engineered crops and products prior to rigorous independent

scientific testing. Once again, the burden of proof is being subtly shifted to the doubters, with the

entire world cast in the role of guinea pig. In 1925 Haven Emerson, a Columbia professor of

public health and former New York health commissioner, said of the TEL experience, “Up to the

present time we have almost invariably got our first inkling of a new industrial chemical hazard

by some human catastrophe… it seems rather pitiable in a country of such wealth in means and

knowledge that we had to wait for a series of human catastrophes to develop the demand for a

series of animal experiments.”

Lead Paint vs. Lead Gas

Working alongside Kehoe at first was the Lead Industries Association. Formed primarily to fight

restrictions on the use of lead paint, the LIA was also ready to serve as a sort of all-purpose lead-

issue obfuscator. Though it wouldn’t fund much actual research, the LIA would underwrite the

original studies at Harvard in the twenties that isolated a new pseudo-psychological malady

named “pica,” the so-called unnatural impulse of some small children, mostly nonwhite, to stick

lead paint chips in their mouths.

Much to LIA’s chagrin, Kehoe would break ranks with them on the subject of lead paint, judging

their product indefensible in light of all small children’s tendency to put things in their mouths.

Coming from the lead-happy Kehoe, this was a grim diagnosis indeed. Happily for the doctor, in

1958 LIA and the former American Zinc Institute founded another industry advocacy group, the

International Lead Zinc Research Organization, with an eye to promoting global use of the lead

additive in fuel and protecting makers of cadmium, the toxic zinc relation often found in

batteries. Kehoe and Ethyl would find a happier home at ILZRO, which would fund the

occasional scientific study. Dr. Paul Mushak, visiting professor of pediatric toxicology at Albert

Einstein College of Medicine, told The Nation that the industry has tended to underwrite research

toward the margins of relevant issues, so as to avoid discovering something it might not like.

Kehoe’s split with LIA and the lead-paint camp was, oddly, beneficial for both parties. Ever

since, the lead-paint and lead-gasoline interests have been able to point the finger at one another

when assessing their own responsibility for the global lead-pollution problem, buying more time

to sell their products and more time to distance themselves from potential liability.

Ethyl Changes Hand

By the late thirties Ethyl had sewed up the US market, as noted, and was making major inroads

in Europe. After World War II, Third World markets would begin to be opened. On the surface

things looked pretty good for the company, which by now had blanketed the earth with its “gift

of God.” As “The Ethyl Story,” an insert in the Ethyl corporation’s annual report for 1963,

observed with enthusiasm, “today, lead alkyl antiknock compounds are used in more than 98

percent of all gasoline sold in the United States and in billions of gallons more sold in the rest of

the world. Leaded gasoline is available at 200,000 service stations in this country and thousands

of others around the globe.”

Strange it was, then, that in 1962 GM and Standard suddenly dumped the Ethyl Corporation on

the market. Even more surprising to many was the buyer, the tiny Albermarle Paper

Manufacturing Company of Richmond, Virginia, and the structure of the deal: It was the modern

world’s first recorded leveraged buyout. Albemarle, owned by the Gottwald family, had acquired

Ethyl, eighteen times its size, with $200 million of borrowed money, making the front page of

the New York Times. “It was like a Mom and Pop grocery buying the A&P!” remarked an

incredulous Monroe Jackson Rathbone, Standard Oil of New Jersey’s president, after

presumably taking a back seat in the negotiations.

No one who’s talking knows why GM wanted out of Ethyl in 1962. Ethyl’s official historian

notes dryly that profits were flat in the late fifties. The company’s TEL patents had expired in

1947, and this allowed Nalco, PPG and Houston Chemical to get into the TEL game on the back

of Ethyl’s yeoman work. But Ethyl was still the 800-pound gorilla in the tetraethyl arena;

overall, profits were pleasingly plump and Ethyl’s annual reports were upbeat. A more important

factor may have been the sense that antitrust was in the air, with the du Pont family being

ordered by the government during this period to divest billions in GM shares. Ethyl’s incestuous

paternity and its unseemly relations with Nazi Germany during World War II were reasons to

avoid closer scrutiny by a nosy government. And, just perhaps, GM might have known

something heavy was coming.

Ethyl’s new owners would, in fact, soon find themselves staring at more worrisome smoke

signals than a patch of duff profits. In July 1943 the Los Angeles Times reported the city’s first

major smog episode. In 1950 Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit reported that the interaction of hydrocarbons

(HC) and oxides of nitrogen (NOX) caused smog in Los Angeles. By 1953 automobiles would

be identified as the region’s largest source of hydrocarbons. Though they may or may not have

known it in 1962, the makers of TEL would soon be staring down the barrel of a gun–the anti-air

pollution movement.

American auto makers saw the threat that air pollution posed to their business. In the mid-fifties

they’d concluded a formal but secret agreement among themselves to license pollution-control

technologies jointly and not publicize discoveries in the area without prior approval of all the

signatories, a pre-emptive strike against those who would pressure them to install costly

emissions controls. The effect of their pact would be to stifle the development of these much-

needed devices and technologies. When their agreement came to the Justice Department’s

attention in 1969, the fallout from the exposure of their perfidy and mounting awareness of the

nation’s out-of-control smog problem would guarantee passage of air-pollution laws that would

eventually put lead out of business in America. By this time, the legislative mood had changed as

it pertained to the automobile, fueled in large measure by the work–and persecution, by GM–of a

young lawyer and Congressional aide named Ralph Nader, who, after raising serious questions

about auto safety, had been followed and harassed by GM’s private detectives.

Crucially, too, by 1969 the entire Kehoe view of natural human lead burdens had been knocked

out–with one punch–by Dr. Clair Patterson, a California Institute of Technology geochemist. A

onetime member of the Manhattan Project, Patterson is widely credited with giving us our most

accurate estimate of the earth’s age–4.55 billion years. With the publication in 1965 of his

seminal work, “Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man,” in the Archives of

Environmental Health, the scientific world had its hardest proof ever that high background lead

levels in industrial lands were man-made and endemic. Noticing heavy planetary lead

contamination in the process of establishing the age of the planet, Patterson detailed how

industrial man had raised his lead burden 100 times and levels of atmospheric lead 1,000 times.

Kehoe’s rule of error ended in a flash.

Kehoe held his head high in his remarks to Edmund Muskie’s Congressional clean air

subcommittee in 1966, but Patterson had turned him into an academic train wreck. Unlike

Kehoe, Patterson utilized state-of-the-art methods to avoid subject contamination with

background lead. Analyzing the 1,600-year-old bones of pre-Columbian humans, he showed that

the twentieth-century human lead burden was seriously elevated. Though Patterson’s work was

widely hailed by the scientific community (it was the reason Kehoe was humored, rather than

respected, by the Muskie committee), the paper earned the professor a visit from representatives

of the Ethyl corporation, who, in Patterson’s words, tried to “buy me out through research

support that would yield results favorable to their cause.”

Instead of joining forces with Ethyl, Patterson delivered a lecture assailing the company’s

activities and predicting the demise of their TEL operation. Following these events, his

longstanding contract with the Public Health Service was not renewed, nor was a substantial

contract with the American Petroleum Institute. Members of the board of trustees at Cal Tech

leaned on the chairman of his department to fire him. Others have alleged that Ethyl offered to

endow a chair at Cal Tech if Patterson was sent packing.

In January 1969 the four major US auto companies and their trade association–along with seven

manufacturers of trucks and cabs, listed as co-conspirators–were accused by the Justice

Department of conspiracy to delay development and use of devices to control air pollution from

cars, based on their secret agreement. Though they would settle the government’s suit in

September by agreeing to terminate their compact as well as all joint research, publicity or

lobbying on emissions issues, Detroit’s position vis-à-vis air pollution had been severely

compromised. Ethyl was on its own now, and it was fair and easy game to take the fall.

On January 14, 1970, GM president Ed Cole announced to a flabbergasted audience the

company’s intention to meet pending clean-air laws with catalytic converters beginning in 1974.

Attached to automotive exhaust systems, these devices trap many harmful emissions. However,

the catalysts’ active element, platinum, is expensive, a real problem when it is rendered instantly

inoperative (and the car undrivable) by the lead in “ethylized” gasoline. Farewell, then, leaded

gasoline.

Ethyl was livid. As an authorized corporate biographer wrote some years later, “Here was

General Motors, which had fathered the additive, calling for its demise! And it struck some

people as incongruous–not to use a harsher word–for General Motors to sell half of what was

essentially a lead additive firm for many millions and then to advocate annihilation of the lead

antiknock business.”

“‘Get the lead out’ has become a slogan in every household,” Lawrence Blanchard Jr., an Ethyl

exec, complained. “I still stay awake some nights trying to figure out how we got into this mess.”

Big Lead Fights Back

Tetraethyl lead was no longer GM’s concern. Nor was it the concern of other auto makers, who

followed suit announcing that they too would adopt the catalyst to meet ever-tightening federal

emissions standards. Du Pont and Ethyl, on the other hand–along with a ragtag bunch of

cheapskate oilmen who hoped to avoid upgrading their refineries to produce unleaded gasoline

of sufficiently high octane–still cared a lot about American sales of TEL. When the EPA

launched the first of several halfhearted attempts to begin removing lead from gasoline, lead’s

corporate affinity group fought back with a ferocity that bespoke major arrogance and even

greater desperation. No sooner had the EPA announced a scheduled phaseout, setting a reduced

lead content standard for gasoline in 1974, than it was sued by Ethyl and Du Pont, who claimed

they had been deprived of property rights. In that same year, a panel of the US Court of Appeals

for the District of Columbia Circuit set aside the EPA’s lead regulations as “arbitrary and

capricious.”

Ethyl had argued that “actual harm” must be shown, not just “significant risk,” before their

product could be outlawed, and the panel agreed. That Ethyl could make the argument at all was

a troubling reminder that the executive and legislative branches of the United States government

had signally failed to heed the Surgeon General’s committee’s original request for funding in

1926 for more independent research, leaving the driving, scientifically speaking, to Robert

Kehoe.

In 1976 the full United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit overturned the decision

against the EPA, finding that “significant risk” was adequate foundation for the agency’s action

against lead and within its authority. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a longtime Ethyl

director when he was a Virginia corporate lawyer, didn’t need to recuse himself, as the Court

refused to hear an appeal brought by TEL makers Ethyl, Du Pont, Nalco and PPG, as well as the

National Petroleum Refiners Association and four oil companies. Ethyl’s excitable Blanchard

lashed out, “The whole proceeding against an industry that has made invaluable contributions to

the American economy for more than fifty years is the worst example of fanaticism since the

New England witch hunts in the Seventeenth Century.”

Fighting on the beaches and fighting on the seas, an impassioned Ethyl wasn’t going to go down

easy, urging a reprieve for leaded fuel at a 1979 meeting of the Petrochemical Energy Group.

Soon after, the company’s oil industry amigos would sound the alarm for a mysterious “octane

crisis” on account of an alleged increase in competition for aromatics, crude oil components that

are mainstays of the plastics and synthetics businesses, as well as unleaded gasoline octane

boosters. To combat the crisis, they requested an EPA slowdown on the gradual phaseout of lead.

The petrochemical industry–led by Du Pont, Monsanto and Dow–would simultaneously launch

an intensive lobbying campaign to delay the scheduled lead phaseout, charging, in a reminiscent

tack, that the newly discovered dearth of aromatics “threatens the jobs of the 14 million

Americans directly dependent and the 29 million Americans indirectly dependent on the

petrochemical industry for employment.”

The ever-hopeful lead cabal’s dreams were cruelly dashed in early 1982, after word leaked out of

Vice President George Bush’s Task Force on Regulatory Relief that the newly elected Reagan

Administration planned to relax or eliminate the US lead phaseout. Recognizing its cue, Du Pont

formally called upon the EPA to rescind all lead regulations. EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch

was only too pleased to comply, but she unwittingly launched a firestorm of bad publicity in

advance of an announcement by telling a visiting refiner with a big mouth that she would not

enforce violations of current lead limits because the regulations would soon be repealed. When

Gorsuch’s remarks appeared in the newspapers (and were lampooned in the comic strip

Doonesbury), Reagan’s EPA would, under heavy political pressure, strike a compromise that

effectively sped up the phaseout. Once again, Ethyl had been let down by old friends.

The New Science of Lead

Ethyl and Octel continued to whine, but by 1984 the health benefits of America’s lead phaseout

had become too remarkable to ignore, and it was this fact that ultimately ended lead’s reign in

America. The harmful effects of lead at lower and lower concentrations had been shown by

independent studies in the late seventies and early eighties, and by now PHS was at long last

settling in with the antilead camp. EPA economist Joel Schwartz, assigned by his Reaganaut

superiors to examine the impact of the lead phaseout on small refiners preparatory to phasing

lead back in, went rogue and reported back instead on the impact of the phaseout’s early years on

American blood-lead levels, which the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had been

independently compiling. The CDC’s findings were startling, contradicting everything leadheads

of the Kehoe school held dear.

Between 1976 and 1980 the EPA would report, the amount of lead consumed in gasoline

dropped 50 percent. Over the same period, blood-lead levels dropped 37 percent. The EPA

estimated that the public benefits of the phaseout, which included reduced medical costs and

lower maintenance for cars, had already exceeded costs by $700 million. Between 1975 and

1984 lead for gasoline consumption dropped 73 percent, while ambient air lead decreased 71

percent [see graph in printed issue].

The Lead Industries Association was so angry with the data the EPA had corralled that in June

1984 it sued the CDC, which had impaneled its lead experts to prepare an updated statement on

childhood lead poisoning for the nation’s medical and public health community (the suit was

dismissed on jurisdictional grounds). Schwartz told The Nation that the collection of lead data

was hindered by the Reagan Administration, which, early in its term, prohibited the CDC from

requiring lead-screening programs to report results to it, figures that it would then publish each

quarter in the scientific journal Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Reports. Subsequently, the CDC

was prohibited from even inquiring about lead-screening program results.

As more impartial studies were funded, however, the common-sense objections to leaded gas

raised by public health campaigners in the twenties only seemed more prescient. Yandell

Henderson, Alice Hamilton, David Edsall and numerous other eminent public health scholars

had precisely predicted the problem sixty years earlier, before it became a global condition.

Sadly, they were ignored. Dispersed into the air in automobile exhaust, lead dust would be no

more healthy than it was when lead smelting was identified as a poisonous pastime 3,000 years

ago. Moreover, as with many industrial toxins, the perceived acceptable level of exposure fell as

further studies were finally carried out.

In the fifties and sixties, blood-lead levels of less than 60 micrograms (a microgram is a

millionth of a gram) per deciliter (one-tenth of a liter) of blood (mcg/dl) were considered

acceptable by America’s medical establishment, not requiring intervention, because overt

symptoms of lead poisoning, such as convulsions, do not typically occur below this level. Prior

to that, dating back to the twenties, lead poisoning usually had to be severe enough to cause

death or severe brain damage to be considered a diagnosed poisoning event. A corresponding

blood-lead level of 80-100 mcg/dl or possibly higher might be imputed. In the intervening years,

the acceptable level has dropped steadily from 40 mcg/dl to 30 to 25 and now to 10 or below.

Though the lead industry advocacy groups cling to the old numbers, the CDC, the American

Academy of Pediatrics, the EPA and the National Academy of Sciences have agreed that the ill-

health effects beginning at 10 mcg/dl are established fact, “an unprecedented coherence of

opinion in the field of neurotoxicology.” In 1994 a letter to the editors of the medical journal

Pediatrics, several prominent lead research doctors addressing industry naysayers wrote, “If this

massive database is not persuasive for lead, then no other chemical can be considered to have

been demonstrated to be toxic.”

Completing a sequence familiar to pollution watchers, a recent review of scientific research by

the National Research Council has led it to conclude, “There is growing evidence that there is no

effective threshold for some of the adverse effects of lead.” Children are especially at risk.

Summarizing its study of the relevant science, the Department of Housing and Urban

Development wrote, “There does not yet appear to be a discernible threshold for the adverse

effects of lead on the young.”

In a 90,000-word 1997 review of all scientific evidence on the subject, Erik Millstone of the

Science and Technology Policy Research Unit at Sussex University concluded that children

suffer ill effects from lead at especially low exposures–much lower than was thought even

recently–including reduced IQ, behavioral and learning difficulties and hyperactivity. Children

are 4-5 times more susceptible to the effects of lead than adults. According to the CDC this is

because children’s digestive systems absorb more lead than adults–40-50 percent of that ingested

versus 10-15 percent. In addition to breathing it in, children will ingest large quantities of

airborne lead when it settles on soil, dust, food and playthings, which eventually contact their

mouths. Based on research linking the two, in 1998 the Justice Department began studying the

impact of childhood lead exposure on juvenile delinquent behavior.

Perhaps the only encouraging news in any discussion of leaded gasoline is how readily blood-

lead levels fall when its use is trimmed or eliminated. The US phaseout of lead began in 1975

and was largely complete by 1986. Based on data collected in more than sixty US cities by the

CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that blood-lead levels in

Americans aged 1-74 had declined 78 percent between 1978 and 1991.

For children aged 1-5, blood-lead levels decreased 76 percent, from 15.0 to 3.6 mcg/dl. The

percent of children with blood-lead levels greater than or equal to 10 micrograms declined from

88 percent to 9 percent. The British Medical Journal reported three years ago that since Britain’s

lead phaseout began, blood-lead levels there had fallen by two-thirds. In New York City, where

the war against tetraethyl lead can be said to have first begun with its ban in 1925, Dr. Sergio

Piomelli, a hematologist at Columbia University’s Children’s Hospital, has reported that before

the US lead phaseout began, 30,000 out of 100,000 New York City children tested had elevated

lead levels; after the phaseout was complete, 1,500 of 100,000 had similarly high levels. In 2000,

he told The Nation, the affected population is even smaller.

Still, one of the most telling measures of the extent of human lead contamination–careful

measurement of lead levels in the bones of our preindustrial ancestors–argues against too much

backslapping. A 1992 article in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that pre-

Columbian inhabitants of North America had average blood-lead levels 625 times lower than the

current “safe” level of 10 mcg/dl.

Eastward, Ho!

Foreign custom kept Ethyl in business, and it put Octel on the map. In the seventies, with the

auto industry embracing catalytic converters and talk of a lead phaseout circulating, the US

market seemed certain to shrink, making foreign profits increasingly important to the lead giants.

Casting back over 1972 in its annual report for that year, Ethyl reminded shareholders,

“Continued penetration of expanding world markets would lessen any…impact on Ethyl’s total

antiknock sales.” The following year, noting growing reservations about the American market, it

went on to recall: “Sales of antiknock compounds continued to increase in all overseas markets

in 1973. To promote this growth, Ethyl International added antiknock bulk terminals in the Far

East, Middle East and South America. Construction of other terminals in various areas of the

world is planned in 1974 and 1975.”

Ethyl further elaborated its foreign strategy in 1974: “Most foreign countries have recognized the

importance of the role lead antiknocks play in conserving crude oil in this period of shortages….

we believe antiknocks will continue to constitute a major product of the Company for years to

come whether or not there is a domestic reduction in use of lead in gasoline.”

By 1979 the company would observe, “It is worth noting that during the second half of 1979, for

the first time, Ethyl’s foreign sales of lead antiknock compounds exceeded domestic sales.”

Ethyl and Octel both were additionally fortunate in being able to manipulate their prices to keep

profit levels high. As Octel reported in a 1998 SEC filing, “From 1989 to 1995, the Company

was able to substantially offset the financial effects of the declining demand for TEL through

higher TEL pricing. The magnitude of these price increases reflected the cost effectiveness of

TEL as an octane enhancer as well as the high cost of converting refineries to produce higher

octane grades of fuel.” In other words, they had their customers over a barrel.

Lead for the Poor

The sad, bitter fruit of Ethyl’s and Octel’s missionary work on behalf of leaded gasoline lies in

its prevalence in the Third World today. Given the current state of knowledge regarding the

hazards of lead, this constitutes a particularly egregious example of environmental racism. While

more than 80 percent of the heaviest lead-using countries today are low income, 70 percent of

low lead users (those that have phased out lead or allow only very low levels) are high income.

While Americans cruise their freeways burning exclusively unleaded gasoline, as of 1996, 93

percent of all gasoline sold in Africa contained lead, 94 percent in the Middle East, 30 percent in

Asia and 35 percent in Latin America.

According to the World Bank, 1.7 billion urbanites in developing nations are in danger of lead

poisoning, including neurological damage, high blood pressure and heart disease from airborne

lead, 90 percent of which is attributable to leaded gasoline. Excessive exposure to lead causes

200,000-500,000 cases of hypertension in the Third World, with 400 deaths per year attributable

to lead exposure in the late eighties. In Mexico City, one of the world’s most polluted (and

populous) cities, 4 million cars pump an estimated 32 tons of lead each day into the air. In

Jakarta, one and a half tons enters the atmosphere every twenty-four hours. A research scientist

with the Canadian National Water Research Institute performed roadside-dust analyses in

Nigeria that revealed as much as 6,000 parts per million of lead. In the United States, lead dust is

considered hazardous to children at 600 ppm [see chart in printed issue].

In Alexandria, Egypt, where gas is heavily leaded, concentrations of TEL and air-lead levels are

often double the European Union’s recommended level, and traffic controllers have been found

to suffer central nervous system dysfunction. In Cairo more than 800 infants die annually

because of maternal exposure to lead. Daytime air-lead levels in Buenos Aires have been

measured at 3.9 grams per cubic meter versus the twenty-four-hour EU limit of 1 gram per cubic

meter.

The continued use of TEL is especially troubling in light of the fact that the Third World’s car

population is multiplying rapidly, a situation that will only intensify if multinational automobile

manufacturers have their way. Although the Chinese government has recently expressed its

intention to remove lead from its fuel, other nations that haven’t are already seeing vehicular

population explosions like that predicted for China.

Prodded by Western lead manufacturers, some countries have even allowed the lead content in

their gasoline to be increased. Although it has since moved toward deleading its gasoline, India,

for instance, more than doubled the amount of lead permitted in its gasoline (from 0.22 to 0.56

grams per liter) during the seventies and eighties; in Uganda, the number soared from 0.58 to

0.84 grams per liter, higher than was ever typical in the West. Never known for their

philanthropy, refiners in poorer nations are disinclined to upgrade their refineries so as to obtain

higher octane gasolines without using lead.

Ironically, in the nineties the Venezuelan state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, exported

unleaded gasoline. But it was importing TEL and adding it to all gasoline sold for domestic use–

this in the country with the greatest number of automobiles per capita in Latin America. By way

of explanation, it is perhaps not unhelpful to know that several high-ranking officials of the state

oil company held consultancies with companies that sell lead additives to the country. Among

the consequences of this corrupt arrangement: According to a 1991 study 63 percent of newborns

studied had blood-lead levels in excess of US “safe” levels.

Environmental standards in Third World countries tend to be lax. Where clean-air laws and

unleaded gasoline do not exist, there is no impetus for automobile manufacturers to install

catalytic converters in their cars. With the rapid growth in automobile use and the growing size

of these countries’ fleets, coupled with low vehicle-turnover rates (car lives of fifteen years are

not at all uncommon in low-income countries) and minimal maintenance, air pollution becomes a

much greater hazard. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of India’s

pollution is generated today by vehicles, compared with only 24 percent in 1971; the WHO

estimates that 7,500 deaths in New Delhi each year are related to air pollution.

Finally, because lead ruins catalytic converters and fouls modern engine-management computers,

leaded gasoline prevents motorists in these countries from using more efficient, less-polluting

modern vehicles even if they want to. Where cars equipped with catalysts are sold as new or used

vehicles, a predominantly leaded fuel supply invites motorists to either remove the air-cleansing

catalysts or destroy them by filling their cars with leaded fuel.

It’s Cleanup Time

The public health benefits and cost savings to societies of removing lead from gasoline are so

vast that the business-friendly World Bank was moved–at a 1996 UN conference in Turkey,

where leaded gas still accounts for 82 percent of the market–to call for a complete global

phaseout. The bank calculated that the United States had saved more than $10 for every $1 it

invested in its conversion to unleaded, by reducing health costs, saving on engine maintenance

and improving fuel efficiency with modern engine technologies. Further claiming that no-lead

fuel may increase engine life by as much as 150 percent, the bank called for an immediate five-

year phaseout. (Buttressing the World Bank’s public-spirited campaign, undoubtedly, is the

realization that many of the state-owned oil companies currently producing leaded gasoline will

require private investment–and possibly ownership–to finance refinery upgrades to produce

high-octane unleaded fuels.)

Unsurprisingly, the industry, which favors phaseouts of twenty-years’ duration and more,

responded testily:

“Octel and the World Bank have been discussing the transition from leaded to unleaded gasoline

for a long time,” a spokesman told the Chemical Marketing Reporter in 1996. “It isn’t really

appropriate for the World Bank to apply US studies and data to the phaseout of lead in Third

World countries.”

Ethyl and Octel both have strategies for dealing with Third World nations seeking to go

unleaded. In separate interviews with The Nation, they admitted advising their remaining

customers to go slow. As Ethyl’s vice president of international sales, Bob Yondola, explained:

“As countries have the infrastructure to support unleaded gasoline, have the monies for their

people to buy the new cars, etc., etc., it makes sense [to switch to unleaded gas]. But if you’ve

got some parts of the world where their infrastructure is still–you know, they need to come up

with food and water, and sewers…for their people. And there are still places in the world like

that. Then, I mean, getting the lead out of the gasoline, to me, wouldn’t make as much sense as

having sewers.”

Associated Octel’s public affairs spokesman Bob Larbey, since retired, said his firm will help

Third World refiners clean up their contaminated lead operations, for a fee. “But,” he said, “we

talk to developing countries. For example, refiners come to us and say, ‘We want to get the lead

out,’ because we’re refinery experts, you see, and we could advise them on how they could best

phase lead out, with what strategy. I think if we argue anything at all, we say, ‘Well, if you’re

going to go out of lead, fine, let’s talk a bit, but there’s no need, this is the lead in health

information, there’s no proven adverse health affect, and so there’s no need for you to do it

precipitously. You might not want to take twenty years [as in the European phaseout] but really,

there’s no need to rush.’ Because if you replaced it with other components of petrol then there’s

a risk from anything…. Petrol itself is a risk without lead.”

The lead industry clutches the alleged dangers of other octane-enhancing gasoline additives near

to its bosom. While admitting the hazard of his company’s product, one Octel executive told the

New York Times that leaded fuel is an “economic and environmental bargain” for the Third

World because it improves fuel economy, which lowers other emissions like benzene, also found

in gasoline.

“Getting rid of one environmental risk won’t necessarily improve public health if you replace it

with greater risks,” yet another spokesman for Octel’s affiliate told the Chemical Marketing

Reporter. Benzene, the hazard to which lead enthusiasts refer most often, can be used by refiners

to boost octane cheaply in the absence of lead. But it isn’t mandatory, and any sensible lead-

reduction regulation would limit its use. Moreover, while as many as 5,000 Americans died

annually from lead-related heart disease prior to the lead phaseout, only forty-seven people

developed cancer from the use of benzene as a lead replacement. “The health impacts of

aromatics [like benzene] are several orders of magnitude less than that of lead,” said a World

Bank spokesperson.

Diversification and Spinoff

Selling lead is an unusually profitable business. As Ethyl’s 1995 report to shareholders blandly

observes, lead additive sales accounted for 26 percent of gross revenues, but 74 percent of its

profit. In 1995 the New York Times wrote of the profit bonanza Octel’s then-owner, Great Lakes

Chemical, had stumbled upon when, searching for sources of bromine for fire retardants, it

landed in the TEL business.

Far from petering out, demand for leaded gasoline, while shrinking, has remained far stronger

than anyone predicted, especially in the third world. Meanwhile, every other major producer has

stopped making the additives, known as tetraethyl lead, or TEL. That has left Great Lakes with

an unexpected flood of profits and 90 percent of a market that no one else will enter because of

the environmental problems associated with lead and the huge capital costs of building a new

plant.

Octel’s old plant, along the Manchester Ship Canal outside Liverpool, bankrolled immense

growth for Great Lakes, allowing it to double in size within five years (to $5 billion in annual

revenue) following its acquisition of Octel, all the while maintaining a hefty 15 percent annual

operating profit. As recently as 1977 Great Lakes had only $50 million in operating revenue.

Years of lead profits have funded major diversification efforts for Ethyl and its owners, led by

the Gottwald family of Richmond. The company’s annual report for 1996 revealed “a long-

running strategy: namely, using Ethyl’s significant cash flow from lead antiknocks to build a

self-supporting major business and earnings stream in the petroleum additives industry.”

By 1983 Ethyl had become “the world’s largest producer of organo-metallic chemicals.” It

would expand its production for the petroleum industry (including the purchase of the petroleum

additives divisions of Amoco and Texaco), as well as acquire interests in other specialty

chemicals, plastics and aluminum products, oil, gas and coal. Ethyl would also invest billions in

pharmaceuticals, biotech research, semiconductors and life insurance. At great expense, it would

develop a serene corporate campus of seventy acres along the banks of the James River in

Richmond.

As the science against TEL mounted and government regulation stiffened, Ethyl began a series

of restructurings that today find its TEL business standing suspiciously alone. In 1989 Ethyl spun

off Tredegar Industries, a group it created to hold its aluminum, plastics and energy businesses.

For every Ethyl share they held, investors would receive prorated shares in the new company.

Voilà! Limited liability. Later Ethyl would spin off its billion-dollar insurance company, First

Colony Life. In 1994 Ethyl would split up its chemical and petroleum additives division and

create a wholly owned subsidiary, Albemarle Corporation, named after the 100-year-old paper

company that bought Ethyl (which retained its name) in 1962. One of the main enterprises of

Albemarle, ironically, is supplying Ethyl with MMT under a long-term agreement. MMT is

another gasoline additive (made of manganese and barely sold in the United States) with

suspected health consequences. In 1994 Ethyl and its Albemarle offspring did a rousing $48

million of business together. Oddly, for a company that claims to be proud of its product (so

proud that under an obscure provision of NAFTA it sued the Canadian government for outlawing

MMT) Ethyl declined to tell Automobile Magazine in 1999 in which countries it sold MMT to

refiners, presumably because it fears awakening consumers to the presence of its manganese

additive.

Because it was itself spun off to a management team from Great Lakes Chemical, Octel remains

highly concentrated in lead, with TEL representing 85 percent of its business in 1996. Although

CEO Dennis Kerrison has announced his intention to develop non-TEL businesses into core

businesses by 2005, “even the most extreme estimates allow for the continued use of leaded

petrol in some parts of the world until at least the year 2010.” Off the record, company officials

admit they could be selling lead in 2020 and beyond.

Until then, Octel, “through the specialist facilities of Octel Environmental, provides a range of

decontamination, destruction, removal and recycling services to refineries throughout the world

to help to reduce the environmental impact of toxic lead residues.” Under its Product

Stewardship Programme–“a public service,” Octel calls it–fifty tons of lead alkyl sludge were

removed from New Zealand refineries as part of a cleanup beginning in 1996. Octel had supplied

the refineries with 4,000 tons of TEL annually for years. So, in a crowning irony, poisoned

motorists in New Zealand and around the world will, through higher gasoline prices, pay Octel

(and Ethyl) to clean up the mess the TEL barons and their refinery customers made.

Will the Sun Ever Set on Lead?

Associated Octel’s fiftieth-anniversary catalogue affectionately quotes a letter the company

received from a former technical services manager in 1982, when Britain’s antilead campaign

kicked off in earnest: “Many funerals have been arranged for lead in petrol–1926, 1943, 1954,

1970, etc.–as I can recall. The grave has been dug, the service arranged, the coffin prepared, the

parson and mourners instructed, but the body just would not lie down in the coffin.”

Though the catalogue was published in 1988, the sentimental hope that it’s not over yet is

secretly still held by Octel and Ethyl, and all the others who continue to push leaded gasoline.

But the body of tetraethyl lead must be made to lie down in its coffin. The five-year phaseout of

leaded gasoline favored by the World Bank in 1996 makes inarguable moral and business sense–

two things that don’t always go together, especially at the World Bank. The only ones arguing

otherwise are Octel, Ethyl and the small coterie of self-interested researchers and narrowly

trained toxicological technicians who’ve lived on the industry’s tab for the last thirty years, since

Robert Kehoe stepped down.

Many European nations have banned leaded gas for 2000. Progress has been made. But

somehow Ethyl and Octel will be splitting Third World profits for years to come. If the science

was ever in doubt (and it really wasn’t), the facts are now incontrovertible. Leaded gasoline is

dangerous. When safer alternatives are available, as they always have been, leaded gasoline’s

benefits are nil. It is not good for cars, and it prevents the use of modern emissions reduction

equipment, like catalytic converters, which, owing to the greenhouse effect, the world needs

more desperately now than ever. TEL’s most crass (and main) historic selling point is no longer

valid: It isn’t even cheap.

There is at least one simple lesson to be drawn from the tetraethyl lead story. Industry cannot be

trusted to regulate itself, as Clair Patterson–the man who dated the earth and single-handedly

deflated ethylized science–once remarked. “It is not just a mistake for public health agencies to

cooperate and collaborate with industries in investigating and deciding whether public health is

endangered–it is a direct abrogation and violation of the duties and responsibilities of those

public health organizations.”

As for General Motors, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Ethyl, Associated Octel and rest of the lead cabal,

it’s conceivable they’ll be hauled into court sooner or later, which is one reason these companies

all take such an active interest in so-called tort reform legislation. You would too, if you had

been a key actor in one of the most tortious episodes of twentieth-century industrial history. We

can hope that Congress doesn’t give them a free pass, but no matter what, it will be the citizenry

that will pay any financial bills coming due. They’ve already paid with their health. Many of the

effects of childhood lead exposure are irreversible.

These businesses should be shut down. And to make sure they don’t forget their heinous

experience, all these companies ought to open their archives to independent review, to assist in

assembling the information that will help lay TEL down to eternal rest, to help show the world

what went wrong when common sense was put on hold in the name of profit. In the face of all

that is known today, the leaderships of foreign countries who continue to poison their people

with TEL should be harangued to phase out lead from their gasoline–on a daily basis, by the

United Nations as well as by governments, agencies and medical officials from around the world.

Until then, the merchants of tetraethyl lead–or any other unnecessary additive known to be

dangerous–are no better than criminals. They should be dealt with accordingly. Maybe in this

new century they will be.

The author wishes to thank for their assistance and to acknowledge the research of Professor

William Kovarik, Dr. Herbert Needleman, Professors David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Dr.

Jerome Nriagu, Dr. Amy Kyle, Richard Merritt, Richard Bremner and Alan Loeb. He would also

like to express particular gratitude to his research associate, Bill Krauss, his editor, Richard

Lingeman, and his fact-checker, Michael Kunichika.

Jamie Lincoln Kitman, New York bureau chief for Automobile Magazine, won an investigative

reporting award from Investigative Reporters and Editors for his Nation article on leaded

gasoline. A member of the Society of Automotive Historians, Jamie Lincoln Kitman drives a

1966 Lancia Fulvia and a 1969 Ford Lotus-Cortina, both of which run fine on unleaded.